Establishing a sustainable automation community of practice

What is a community of practice?

A community of practice is a collaborative framework in which stakeholders across teams unify efforts to build automation capabilities. The community of practice fosters cross-functional communication, standardizes automation practices, and accelerates innovation through the sharing of knowledge, ideas, and lessons learned. It serves as a hub across disparate yet adjacent teams for the reuse of solutions and the development of consistent operational models.

Note: The terms center of excellence, community of excellence, and community of practice are often used interchangeably within the industry. You can learn more about how Red Hat differentiates between a center of excellence and a community of practice in this blog. Regardless of terminology used, what's most important is to focus on the right approaches, activities, and outcomes. 

Real-world automation community of practice success

Recently, Red Hat partnered with a government organization to establish a structured automation community of practice that would unify automation efforts across disparate technical teams.

Initial challenges

Before the implementation of the community of practice, the organization experienced significant challenges due to a lack of standardization, including redundant automation development use cases, minimal cross-team collaboration and knowledge sharing, and increased time and budget costs associated with supporting multiple tools and frameworks.

Post-community of practice implementation outcomes

Once the community of practice was in place, designated representatives from different domains began meeting regularly to:

• Share automation progress, blockers, and lessons learned.
• Collaboratively troubleshoot and review each other’s work.
• Align on reusable automation content and development standards.

Recommendations for your community of practice

Using the learnings from the government organization, you can establish your own automation communities of practice. To enable success, you will need: 

A unified automation platform

Multiple teams and roles are strongly recommended in coordinating their automation and workflow efforts on a unified automation platform. Fragmented toolsets result in redundant efforts, incompatibility issues, and increased operational costs. A unified platform enables code reuse, content sharing, and collective problem solving.

Recommendations:

• Identify and agree on a minimal toolset capable of supporting cross-domain requirements.
• Establish and maintain shared repositories for reusable automation content.

Leadership sponsorship and resource commitment

The most critical factor to establishing a successful community of practice is having executive leadership who can provide visible and continuous support for the community of practice initiative. This includes allocating time and personnel, removing organizational barriers, and formally recognizing community of practice participation as part of job responsibilities.

Recommendations

• Leadership should designate the community of practice as a strategic initiative.
• Time allocation for participation should be integrated into team charters or contractual language where possible.

Designated team representation

Each functional team (e.g., networking, Linux, Windows, storage) must assign 1–2 dedicated representatives to actively participate in community of practice activities.

Recommendations:

• Representatives should attend all community of practice meetings and be responsible for communicating updates and collecting feedback from their respective teams.
• Consistency in participation is essential to establish continuity and build trust.

Organizational alignment and buy-in

All participating teams must commit to adopting the community of practice’s chosen platform and methodology. Each team should have a clear understanding of how the shared approach benefits their specific goals and responsibilities.

Recommendations:

• Establish a shared communication workspace (i.e., a Microsoft Teams or Slack channel) to bring real-time collaboration, knowledge sharing, and efficient problem solving.
  • Participation in the shared channel is expected as part of each representative’s community of practice responsibilities.
  • A channel lead or moderator should facilitate discussions and ensure questions are addressed promptly.
• Promote technology enablement through the following activities:
  • Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform courses available in the Red Hat Learning Subscription
  • Red Hat enablement sessions and demos

Implementation timeline

Below is an example of a sample schedule for the work of your automation community of practice: 

Months 1–2: Foundation building

• Deploy a production-ready Ansible Automation Platform accessible to all teams.
• Establish shared version control infrastructure (e.g., GitLab) for automation content.
• Select a unified issue-tracking and workflow management system.
• Define and document development lifecycle standards (e.g., pull request guidelines, code review expectations).
• Select initial cross-cutting automation use cases that benefit multiple teams. For example, server provisioning (Linux and Windows) is commonly impactful.

Months 3–4: Joint execution and learning

• Teams collaboratively implement the selected use cases.
• Dedicate regular working sessions (e.g., daily 2-hour meetings) to pair programming, troubleshooting, and design reviews.
• Complete and deploy the initial automation solutions.
• Use early successes to demonstrate tangible value and reinforce engagement. Early noticeable success is important.

Months 5–6+: Maturing and scaling

• Teams select more domain-specific automation use cases.
• Participants should be more comfortable in their Ansible Automation Platform knowledge thus reducing their need to rely on others.
• Shift community of practice meetings to a bi-weekly cadence using a stand-up format focused on:
  • Reviewing Kanban board items.
  • Merging pull requests.
  • Discussing blockers or escalations.
• Reinforce an “automation-first” mindset to institutionalize the practice of evaluating new IT requirements through the lens of automation.

Ongoing expectations

To keep the community of practice active and thriving, community of practice stand-ups should be considered mandatory for designated representatives. Furthermore, all new projects and requirements must incorporate automation planning during their initial scoping phase, and content must be consistently maintained and documented within a shared repository for auditing and reuse purposes.

Additional resources

• Learn how Ansible Automation Platform supports your automation community of practice.
• Uncover more expert tips and advice for your automation community of practice.
• Discover actionable ways to advance your automation maturity.