Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

by Matthew Skelton

Enabling Team versus Communities of Practice (CoP) Both enabling teams and communities of practice (CoP) can help to increase awareness and capabilities within other teams. The members of an enabling team work on enabling activities full-time, whereas a CoP is a more diffuse grouping of interested individuals from across several teams, with an aim to share practices and improve working methods on a weekly (or monthly) basis. In her book Building Successful Communities of Practice, Emily Webber says “Communities of practice create the right environment for social learning, experiential learning, and a rounded curriculum, leading to accelerated learning for members.”11 Enabling teams and CoP can co-exist because they have slightly different purposes and dynamics: an enabling team is a small, long-lived group of specialists focused on building awareness and capability for a single team (or a small number of teams) at any one point in time, whereas a CoP usually seeks to have more widespread effects, diffusing knowledge across many teams. Of course, several enabling teams can also have their own “enabling-teams community of practice!”