The Challenge of Internal Communities in an Enterprise IT Organization
The quest for agility brings a clear focus on autonomous teams and rightly so. Only autonomous teams can achieve the level of ownership and independence that allows to deliver customer value at the breathtaking speed required in today’s competitive IT business.
Larger IT organizations face the additional need to create some kind of alignment between the teams. Having a clear vision and purpose is obviously imperative but there are also other ways that can strengthen communication across the different autonomous teams.
One useful way is the creation of internal communities that act as platforms to enable the exchange of knowledge and experiences but also provide an opportunity for a more bottom-up approach to alignment.
We have been responsible to build up internal communities in a fairly traditional finance institution and along our way we experienced a lot of great things but also a lot of difficulties and we hope that our leanings may be useful for other people facing similar challenges. Please note that our experiences are not necessarily all connected to our current work but many of them are.
Let’s start with three areas where we see potential for trouble.
Number One: Expectations
In many cases, the decision to start with internal communities is done top down by upper IT management as part of an agile transformation. Team autonomy is a new concept for traditional enterprises that have been working in fairly hierarchical command and control mode. So there is a clear view on the need of alignment and in many cases some kind of adapted „Spotify“ model acts as a blueprint. The communities are embedded in a new organizational structure and then kicked off.
People from the product teams are either assigned to the community or supposed to be attracted by the perspective of knowledge and experience exchange.
Expectations about the enthusiasm to join the community and the immediate impact generated are often great.
Number Two: People
Internal IT communities are a great opportunity for people who want to get some visibility and show their expertise. Being active in a community can largely enhance the radius of impact an employee can achieve. But let’s be honest — not everybody wants that.
Many people rather work on their own stuff and really don’t want to be bothered which is also fine.
But just for the sake of clarity — we don’t want to finger point. Many of these patterns have complex causes and as almost always company culture driven by organization and leadership plus their history are some the most important factors. What also is an important factor is unclear directions to employees by management and that brings us to the third focus area.
Number Three: Management
Management is involved in the creation and fostering of thriving communities in multiple ways. First, as already mentioned above, upper management is in many cases kick starting the setup of communities as part of an overall transformation process. But another important point is that meaningful community work obviously involves spending time and effort for the community — hours that need to be taken from regular working time.
In almost all enterprise organizations, even the ones that have already been undergoing transformation processes that flattened hierarchies, there still is a layer of middle management that is responsible to execute the strategy and deliver business results. In modern settings, a lot of responsibility is shifted to the autonomous teams- a lot of it also business related. But middle management is still seen as an enabler and responsible for e.g. the consolidated business of a business line.
As long as there is no overall focus across the management hierarchy on outcome over output, middle management as the responsible layer for delivery has a hard time justifying the work that is needed for the community.
This creates a difficult situation for all people involved: Upper level management has high expectations on the effectiveness of a community and pushes this expectations down to middle management for execution. Middle management is used to be measured (and in many cases still is) on output and not outcome and thus often doesn’t fully endorse spending hours for community work (as they reduce short term output). But to be compliant to transformation strategy they push the decision how much time to spend down to team member which again now are in the same dilemma. As they can’t shift decisions downwards, they almost always prioritize product work over community work.
What can you do?
Based on these learnings we have tried to distill a few preconditions and good practices that can help building up thriving communities. As always, these are no rules but experiences that will need adaptation for a specific context.
The company must have established a culture of outcome over output
We strongly believe in the business value of internal communities. They are a powerful way of building and sharing knowledge and to help with alignment. But to create communities needs time and effort and the benefits will only be visible medium to long term. If the company is focused on output, effort spent on community work is hardly justifiable.
Top down is not enough
Although top down support from management is absolutely crucial and can act as a kick start it is not enough. Communities only work if people choose freely to contribute and also see some value for them.
Not all people like to contribute
We must accept that many people are not so enthusiastic about community work. So there is no use in expecting people to be a contributing member of a community. It is way better to form a core community of engaged people that really want to contribute. The others may change their mind later if they see value in it.
If you contribute you can also decide
There must be clear communication about the benefits of active community contribution. This is specifically important for communities that are instruments of enterprise-wide alignment and thus can also shape processes or company standards. Only contributors are able to steer things in a specific direction — the silent majority has to accept.