Everett Keithcart

NEED: The QA group needed a community of practice (CoP) because the QA engineers had lost their sense of professional community including much of the communication and support they were previously able to provide one another in their co-located environment. Formerly, all QA Engineers sat together in one large room and are now split up onto separate cross-functional Agile teams.
SOLUTION: I accepted their request to help them start a CoP and teach them how to facilitate it. I used the attached presentation to help explain what a CoP is and some of the key functions necessary to keep it alive and thriving.
I acted as the facilitator for the QA CoP for their first few meetings, leading by example, then handed off the facilitation to a rotating group of facilitators. I taught them methods and gave them tools, such as the A3 process from Toyota, to help them make headway against some of their biggest challenges.
Also at this client, I started several other CoPs including an "uber-CoP" or "CoP of CoPs" that allowed facilitators from different CoPs to share their learnings, cross-talk, and communicate about some of their biggest challenges across the entire enterprise that needed collaboration from other CoPs to solve.