Succeeding with Agile

Formal or Informal

A community of practice can be either formal or informal; most organizations will have a mix. Organizations with strong functional management in place prior to adopting Scrum usually rely on those strong functional managers to support or even establish some of the communities of practice. Etienne Wenger, who invented the term “community of practice,” and his colleagues distinguish five types of communities of practice based on the degree of recognition of the community by the organization. These are shown in Table 17.3.

Table 17.3 Communities of practice range from those no one knows exist to those given official status. (Adapted from Wenger, McDermott, and Snyder 2002.)

Table 17.3 is not meant to represent a hierarchy. No ...