Accelerating adoption of automation through a community of practice

Every solution starts with sharing a problem. At Red Hat, when we talk about the open source way, we're talking about a proven way of collaborating to create technology. The freedom to see the code, learn from it, to ask questions, and offer improvements. Of course, applying this idea to an organization that needs to align and collaborate around a technology like automation is often easier said than done.

What is an automation community of practice?

An automation community of practice is a collection of individuals (automation engineers, network operators, automation developers, automation architects, or any interested parties) coming together to share ideas around Ansible content, experiences, questions, and best practices. Through communities of practice, these individuals learn from one another, discuss best practices, and discover new ways of collaborating. Communities of practice also create a space to consume and contribute automation content so your automation is deployed consistently everywhere.

What are the benefits of an automation community of practice?

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform customers who consistently report the best results and outcomes from automation typically have two things in place. The first is a clearly defined automation strategy. The second is the presence of a robust automation community of practice in the organization with buy-in and executive level support and active engagement at the practitioner level. 

For those IT business leaders, a community of practice addresses:

• Persistent IT automation skills gaps and talent constraints
• Slow and inefficient processes, and lack of collaboration among teams
• Too much focus on manual work and tech debt instead of innovation
• Over-reliance on untested code from public repositories that leads to performance or security issues
• Inconsistent and sometimes conflicting organizational standards and processes

For the hands-on individual, a community of practice can:

• Elevate your experience and expertise to your peers and leadership teams
• Help you improve and grow your skills
• Overcome boredom by working on projects that excite you
• Free up time to be more productive and effective
• Build relationships across teams

Differences between an automation center of excellence and a community of practice

Both centers of excellence and communities of practice can foster learning and collaboration within an organization. However, centers of excellence typically focus on driving excellence and innovation within a specific domain, while communities of practice focus on fostering collaboration and knowledge sharing across many teams or domains. A community of practice is more informal and unstructured, though there are recommended approaches and rules of engagement.

Your organization might begin its automation journey through a formal COE to establish and document organizational standards, but those programs typically evolve quickly into an automation COP.

How do you get started with an automation community of practice?

There are many possible ways to start a community of practice, but the origin story of the most effective ones share some common elements. Here are a few of the techniques used by thriving communities of practice:

Bring your people together

If possible, for your initial planning session, bring users together in person. Through those in person interactions, you'll be able to not only share ideas but make them more actionable in the room. Be sure to include your core team of cross-functional automation champions, including your automation subject-matter expert (SME), IT architects, business and IT SMEs, and developers.

Start with the end in mind

In the beginning, you need to define what success looks like for your community of practice. What's the mission statement and purpose? For example, through one community of practice workshop I conducted, the team developed this mission statement:

Empower and unite our automation community by fostering innovation, supporting users, and maximizing automation solutions to address real business challenges. Create a safe and collaborative environment that encourages the sharing of ideas, builds community and establishes standards within company frameworks, ensuring freedom of time and promoting education among service users.

Ask the right questions

For your initial meetings, there are some key questions that should be discussed and documented:

• Who is this community for?
• Who are the community’s important stakeholders?
• Given the intended audience, what are the key issues and the nature of the learning, knowledge, and tasks that the community will steward?
• Given the audience and domain, what is this community’s primary purpose?
• What are the benefits to the stakeholders?
• What specific needs will the community be organized to meet?
• Is there a limit to the community's growth?
• What kinds of activities will generate energy and support the emergence of community presence? What will the community’s rhythm be (frequency and cadence)?
• How will members communicate on an ongoing basis to accomplish the community’s primary purpose?
• What kinds of interactions with each other and with the content of the community  will generate enthusiasm and engagement?
• What are the learning goals of the community, and how can collaborative learning be supported?
• What are the external resources (people, publications, reports, and so on) that support the community during its initial development? How will members share these resources and gain access to them?
• How will community members collaborate with each other to achieve shared goals?
• How will community roles be defined (individuals, groups, group leaders, community administrators) and who will take them on?
• Exactly how long (in weeks or months) will you spend on your initial incubation period and what goals will you accomplish during this  time?
• What obstacles or pitfalls might you encounter and how can you prevent them from happening?

Share your content

You need Ansible content to attract members, right? You need to document and organize your content and create artifacts so that others can learn from what you've developed.

Making content available in a structured way, through a private automation hub, enables content to be secure, organized, and available to the right people in your organization. This makes your content shareable with others.

You can also accelerate the content creation process with capabilities of Ansible Automation Platform such as Ansible plug-ins for Red Hat Developer Hub, Ansible Content Collections, Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed, and Ansible development tools.

How can you encourage participation in your community of practice?

Communities of practice require engagement from other teams within your IT organization. You can clarify the goals of the community of practice and explain the value of receiving training and hands-on help so they can learn from your success. It helps to cast a wide net and promote your community of practice through multiple channels, not just email. Extend invitations on team calls, chats, through meeting invites, and so on.

I also encourage our customers to allow new users to join and listen in before really engaging and contributing. This behavior is actually a natural progression for new members to a community of practice. You can encourage them to participate when they are comfortable and confident enough to contribute. If you leverage a community of practice as an avenue for mentoring and internal enablement, you will also find that adoption will be a lot quicker.

Finally, inviting someone important who is part of your organization to speak at your launch meeting will be an additional way to attract interest and engagement in your community of practice. You need all levels of your management to buy into the fact that you're trying to stand up a community of practice. Above all, be persistent, creative, patient, and resilient.

Additional resources

• Get expert guidance kicking off your automation community of practice with Red Hat Consulting.
• Hear from our top customers about how they approach their automation strategy.
• Enable automation learning, productivity, and collaboration with Ansible plug-ins for Red Hat Developer Hub.