Health Check for Communities of Practice

I have been working with communities of practice this week to conduct health checks on them. In order to do this we used a methodology which is based on key success factors that you would expect to see in any community then for each of those key success factors we measure the level of maturity that the community has reached.

One of the things when doing health checks like this is to ensure that the community fully understand the context of the measurement. For example if you know that it typically takes five years to reach a particular level and the community your are working with has been in existence for less than a year than it will be highly unlikely that they will be at the top end of any of the maturity scales. I say highly unlikely and not impossible because it could be that the community have done a lot of learning before and have been able to accelerate their progress.

Use of collaborative technology is a good example of this. In some organisations the collaborative technology is well embedded in normal business processes so how a community uses it will be rapidly accelerated and you would expect them to score highly in the technology category.

Counter to this is building trust between community members. This takes time. There are processes and activities which can assist to accelerate this but this is essentially trust between community members is one of those things that increases (or decreases) with time. Trust is something that needs to be worked on, leaving it to chance can lead to a less than optimum outcome.

The health check is also designed not only to indicate where the community is currently but also what they need to do should course corrections be required.

So far the results of the community health checks tend to show that these communities are on track. Several interventions have been identified that will ensure that they continue to work towards delivering the goals they have established for themselves.

Knoco Ltd