
Explore how to build a community of practice through the start guide course, starting with defining the community, modeling development, and applying 20 practical tools to real cases.
Define a community of practice as a group sharing a domain, a caring community, and a shared practice built through mutual engagement.
Develop a community of practice by integrating the community elements, the life cycle, and a structured project management approach to foster engagement, knowledge sharing, and organizational integration.
Learn the PLiED process for developing communities of practice, integrating project management, lifecycle, and elements across initiation, planning, and execution to launch, evaluate, and sustain viable communities.
Learn how to start and evaluate a CoP by planning, launching, and nurturing the community, establishing the domain, community, and practice, and setting up the platform and core group.
Evaluate the community of practice's viability by examining its health and value in organization's knowledge system, using PLiED's formal and formative assessments across domain, community, practice, and sense of community.
Discover the PLiED-aligned quick start toolkit for initiating, planning, and sustaining a community of practice, featuring four tool sets: project definition, participative design, roles, and events and assessment.
Explore participative community design by clarifying a dual-purpose CoP, applying four elements (domain, people, shared practice, sense of community), and co-designing a customizable platform with the solution finder model.
Identify core roles and responsibilities for a healthy community of practice and the five tools for coordination, readiness, and participation.
Expand your management skills with a best practice process model that enables you to design, start and sustain a community of practice by understanding communities as unique organisational structures: i.e. as living things.
Do you have the feeling that developing communities of practice is not easy and at the same time that the available methods are either too simple or too complicated?
Then this course is just right for you! It is a practical introduction to the development of communities of practice that follows a process model that I have developed from real cases over the course of my professional career. A project for developing a community of practice needs to integrate three essential aspects in its process: 1) project management, 2) the community’s lifecycle and 3) its vital elements. The PLiED approach does exactly this and helps you in doing so to start successful, vital and viable Communities of Practice.
Why Communities of Practice? The business world in which we are living today is a world of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity: a so-called VUCA world. It is a new world which changes faster than we can learn. In order to cope successfully in the VUCA world, organisations should develop collaborative cultures, embrace collaborative practices and foster knowledge sharing (see IDC, 2016; Venkatraman, 2018). Communities of practice can help organisations to do exactly this and as such, increase the organisations’ performance and enable them to cope with the VUCA world. What makes communities of practice able to accomplish this? It is their unique organisational approach focused on people and specifically focused on suitable social structures that enable community members to learn with and from each other.
This course is an introduction to quickly starting, evaluating and sustaining communities of practice. An advanced course on the same topic will follow, providing a deeper explanation and broader application of the PLIED approach. I look forward to welcoming you to this and other courses that I would like to publish soon.
But let's get to this course for now and familiarise ourselves with the PLiED approach, a perspective on community development that integrates the three essential aspects needed by a project for developing a community of practice in order to be successful.