The Executive's Guide To SharePoint 2013: Building Successful Communities

In this, the second article in the series, The Executive's Guide To SharePoint 2013, we are going to look at the potential benefits that successful use of communities can deliver, examine some best practices for ensuring success with communities, and show how to create a communities service with SharePoint 2013.

Last time we discussed the different ways that people work together in modern organizations, including communities of practice, communities of purpose, communities of interest and personal networks. We looked at how the new SharePoint 2013 Communities features can be used to facilitate collaboration within communities of practice and interest.

What are the Organizational Level Best Practices for Communities?

Over the past 20 years, communities have become the “killer application” (O’Dell and Hubert 2011) of knowledge management. There is a substantial body of empirical evidence from which we can identify the characteristics of successful initiatives around communities of practice / interest. At the organizational level these include:

1. A supportive organizational, cultural and management framework
2. A consistent enterprise approach to community creation and management
3. A distinction between communities of purpose (project teams), and communities of interest / practice
4. An appropriate technology medium that facilitates knowledge exchange, retrieval and collaboration

A good starting point is to secure top level executive and management commitment to the systematic and strategic use of communities to address significant business challenges and opportunities. Leadership support is vital because executives can drive the organizational change required.

Winning executive support is likely to depend on the identification of one or two centrally sponsored communities and an understanding of their purpose and potential benefits. You’ll need to consider how you are going to encourage active community participation. Gifted badges and reputation points are all very good and well, but most people have targets to meet and things to deliver. A high community rating is unlikely to be seen as an acceptable alternative to doing your job.

You should consider techniques for making community work part of people's jobs. Changes to HR policies to link appraisals and bonus schemes to community contributions are an excellent way to send a clear message that community work is seen as a valued activity in your organization. Since community work is time consuming you might consider it appropriate to require management approval to join communities, and you might want to add community work to timesheet and work tracking systems.

It’s important to have a consistent enterprise approach to the creation and management of communities, and you should provide both for centrally sponsored or top-down communities, and grass-roots or bottom-up communities. Your approach should include a process for suggesting or requesting the creation of a community and a clear and transparent criteria for the evaluation of a request. You should determine the process by which the results or outputs of communities are harvested and shared with the rest of the organization.

It’s a good idea to separate your communities of practice / interest from your communities of purpose. This is because these different types of communities have very different value propositions and raison d’etre. Communities of purpose are about people working together to achieve a specific goal. The community only exists until that goal has been achieved. Communities of practice / interest are about social learning. These communities exist as long as the community members remain motivated to participate.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com