Communities of Practice

Communities-of-Practice (CoP) are groups that deal with specific knowledge and experience topics. All employees have the opportunity to work in the self-organized CoPs within their “practice time” or training period. The P4 framework provides about 10% of the working time for this.

The Communities of Practices are about:

  • Exchange of experience
  • Training and personal development
  • Tools and tools

Typical communities of practice include the following:

  • Requirements engineering
  • Test management and test development
  • Mechanical development, procedures and MCAD tools
  • Electronic engineer and ECAD tools
  • Simulations

but also

  • Cloud technologies
  • Methodology and didactics for trainers
  • SAP gurus
  • IT in the organization
  • Moderation techniques

Within the P4 areas, the corresponding groups at the Cluster level ( Team Scrum Master Group , Team Product Owner Group , Team System Engineer Group ), as well as at the organizational level, have their tasks as well Assignment to deal with typical Pratice topics, such as exchanging experiences, training and tools. However, it may make sense to treat some of these topics within your own practice in order to make them accessible to a larger group or to develop them further with interested people from other fields. The topic “Requirements Engineering” is not only important for product owners.

Practices can be established for any additional “skills” and “disciplines” required.

Self-organization of the community of practice

For a start-up, it is sufficient that at least three people are interested in a topic and want to invest their time in practice. A practice requires a practice mission in which the self-image is described and a practice backlog in which all topics that are important to the community of practice end up. The topics are worked on together, either using Scrum, if the majority of the topics can be planned; using Kanban if the topics arise rather ad hoc.

If there is no longer sufficient interest in the practice, i.e. if fewer than three people have an interest in it, the practice is frozen or ended.

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Suitable and further articles:

Events Roles & Groups Artifacts
Practice time Practice lead Practice backlog