Lessons Learned from Organizing a Scrum Master Community of Practice
I helped to organize a large (60+) Scrum Master community of practice. Some of the lessons learned include:
Key Lessons
- If you have people distributed over several sites or even in different countries, then a regular phone/video conference helps (we ran ours every two weeks). If you can, make sure that audio quality is good. Using a digital connection with headsets often works best.
- Nothing is better than face-to-face though, so even if you have phone/video conferences, still try to organize frequent face-to-face meetings.
- Try to get a budget for the community. This can help with things like travel to face-to-face meetings, food/drink for meetings, and bringing in external speakers.
- If your organization is large or very dispersed, I recommend having local ‘chapters’. These are small communities that meet locally and feed their discussions into the wider community.
- Try to schedule meet-ups at the most convenient time possible. I favor having the community vote on the timing (which day of the week, what time of the day, etc.). You may want to consider having the meetings at two different times during the week, as some people may not be able to make one particular time.
- Consider if you want the community to set standards. You can do something like saying that if there is a unanimous vote for a standard in the community, that then gets rolled out across the whole organization. Be careful with this though, as it needs to be coordinated with your organization's management.
Challenges
One challenge you may encounter is having ‘dominant’ personalities that take over the conversation at community meetings. If this is a possibility, I recommend using a meeting format where everyone gets a chance to speak.