Office Hours

Intro
It is 12:21 PM, and I just received a message notification in the Slack App. A Business Analyst had sent a message in the #badhus channel asking in which table he can find data about iFood restaurants with specific columns. At 02:55 PM, a Business Specialist posted a malformed SQL query asking for help to understand where he messed up. At 3:55 PM, another Business Analyst asked for help to know how she can ‘extract’ numbers from an alphanumerical string, and someone introduced her to Regular Expressions. At 4:10 PM, a Data Architect posted a message warning everyone that some tables will suffer changes soon so that the current users could be aware of it. At 5:31 PM, a Commercial Planning Analyst asked for guidance on requesting access to our Tableau Server. At the end of the workday, a Financial Analyst asked for assistance on using SQL’s AND or OR statements. That was a typical day (more specifically, May 24, 2021) in our company that is on a journey to become data-driven. The channel has around 700 members, our lovely and proud BADHU – as we named them: the Business Analysts Data Heavy Users. By the way, all those messages were replied to by other BADHUs (except the one regarding Regular Expression – which I responded to).
About 18 months ago, we started an initiative called Data Academy and taught SQL to people that never worked nor even thought to work with SQL. We created an introductory course and began to convince people that it would be helpful, valuable to their career, and, to some degree, fun.
The fact is: they liked it a lot. Since then, they were eager to advance their skills. They wanted more. I was asked hundreds of times: "When will we have the second course? And when will you teach us Python?"
The honest answer is: I wouldn’t think a second course is the best route for their journey. I would recommend going to the real work and face the misguiding problems that the course did not cover. Then, try to understand it, search for solutions, and ask for help in #badhus Slack channel. Use these problems as a curriculum for their following study topics.
What is a Community of Practice?
It is almost impossible to better answer this question without relying on this very accurate definition:
"Communities of Practice are groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis."¹
Those communities can exist in multiple forms: small or big, long-lived or short-lived, spontaneous or intentional, in-person on remotely, but they all share a standard structure¹:
- The Domain. The purpose of the community’s existence. It gathers the people through the interest in the topic and guides the learning agenda. It is the official statement of what will be stewarding in that group of people.¹
- The Community. People who interact in a relationship based on mutual respect and trust. They talk, learn, teach, document, and develop the knowledge related to the defined Domain.¹
- The Practice. While the Domain is about the community’s topic, the Practice is the specific knowledge created by the members: documents, frameworks, ideas, and other kinds of materials which just those involved in that community can understand the value.¹
A Community of Practice is a unique combination of these three elements. It is essential to understand that, without a well-defined Domain, the community is just a group of friends. On the other hand, without the Practice, it is just a group of people merely interested in a topic, without taking actions, changing their behaviors, and improving their abilities. In addition, without the Community element, it lacks the human element that constitutes the community.¹
If you want to leverage the knowledge inside your company using the collective wisdom from the employees¹, Communities Of Practice are an option you should consider. It is a strategic approach to develop the knowledge through and with the people who better understand its challenges, share the same concerns, and are eager to get better at their craft.
Connecting the Dots
In the following sections, I will talk about planning and building a Community of Practice. Before that, it is important to warn you that I started planning and building it before even doing so. How is that possible?
I like to remember that things start even before the official start. This idea came to me through Sonke Ahrens with the idea of diligently taking notes frequently to be well-prepared when facing a blank sheet of paper and, maybe more aligned with the audience of this publication, Steve Jobs with the idea of connecting the dots.
That idea can sound a bit strange for those never exposed to that, so here is a personal example about that:
At the beginning of 2021, I had the idea to create a video in "yearly retrospective style" showcasing what happened in the BADHU project. So I spent some hours searching and collecting several past moments in our vast Slack archive, LinkedIn bookmarks, photo albums, etc. The Communication Team didn’t support me, and I decided to archive the idea. Some months after that, a director asked me to prepare a five-minute length presentation about the BADHU project accomplishments – for the next day. I don’t know if you are aware, but a great five-minute presentation is more challenging than anything else because you need to have a complete view of everything first so that you can select the best parts, in the best order, with a coherent speech. Luckily, I started it before, when I did that vastly search – and it could be easier if I started even before, collecting the moments as they happened.
So, how did we start it before? As far as I can remember, business people were intensively asking the Data Analytics team for data. That happened so many times and with an increasing frequency that we knew we needed to act. So, we prepared an experimental "Sql, Datalake and Databricks" course and applied it in person to some early adopters from the Financial team. That went very well, so we recorded it to spread this knowledge through the organization.

After that hard work, another hard work started: the building of the community (not the Community of Practice). We knew that brave people were exploring new paths, looking for data by themselves, "talking" the SQL language, facing spooky errors. So we tried to be fully available for them, replied to their questions, offered calendars slots of time for them. In this process, we could know them better, we saw people advancing in their careers, and we farewell the ones that went to another company. This work was so valuable, and now I understand: We made the course in 1 month while the participants built the community in more than one year – one interaction at a time.
Starting everything right now might be hard, while not impossible. You can look at your organization and try to spot something that it is already done. Maybe there is a kind of informal community that you were never watchful of. If so, you can try to identify: the topics that are important to them, the engaged members, the communication preferences, how new members join that community, how they receive new members, the blockers they may have, etc. On the contrary, you will have to start it from scratch, trying many things and figuring things out. So, start soon and start well. I hope I will help you in the following sections.
"Research Trumps Best Practice"²
Since we decided to launch a Community of Practice, I have read some interesting literature about the topic and realized that this kind of community is very complex: a mix of the many intricacies of human behavior, work environment restrictions, and the challenges that Learning and Knowledge Management quests demand. That doesn’t mean we should abandon the idea; it just means that we need to take a ride upon the shoulders of the people who have studied and, thank goodness, written about it.
So, from where can you learn about Communities of Practice? I strongly recommend that you stick to these two books of Etienne Wenger: 1) Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge, and, if you want to go further, 2) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity.
Additionally, you should see Communities of Practice as a new thing and don’t relate it to another similar term that you may know. The Community of Practice elements (the Domain, Community, and Practice) can be familiar to you, but remember: the true potential is within the "unique combination of these three elements_"_¹. The most common misled term is guild, which is a bit popular due to the famous "Spotify Model." Guilds have their value, but I advise evading them and all other terms coined by big corporations (aka. "best practices"). First, most articles simplify the "Spotify’s guild" explanation in a way that may not help you. In addition, we don’t even know if Spotify uses the Spotify Model. I failed in evading best practices when working on past projects. I even managed to find good stories, but these were "all-went-well" or "out-of-my-context" stories, and despite being inspiring, they were not appropriate. For that reason, my reading is more and more weighted to literature instead of the big companies’ best practices lately.
The suggestion evading big companies’ best practices is not only mine but from someone who works in one of them:
- Prasad Setty, Vice President of People Analytics & Compensation at Google
By following this advice, your chances of success may increase. Maybe your first Community of Practice will not entirely succeed, but probably you will have a sense of the reasons. Otherwise, you will find yourself bound by some dangerous consequences: not knowing the origin of failures, blaming the community members, and demoralizing your team. Through incomplete stories and exposing just the positive facts, the shared best practices lead you to think that it also needs to work well in your context, and it can be damaging if you are not alert about it.
Implementing a Community of Practice
As you will learn from the literature, a Community of Practice needs to be designed and open for evolution¹, so it is better to focus on implementing the initial structure quickly yet well-grounded. After the launch, the community will have a life of its own, and the complexity will come to the surface, demanding constant nurturing and monitoring.
This section will describe how we implemented this initial Community of Practice structure (and you will find the why behind the actions **** in the literature).
Conditions
- Team: 3 part-time people – Brenda, Gabrielle, and me.
- Time: 6-weeks (we follow Basecamp’s Shape Up method).
Pre Work
- Read about Community of Practice.
- Collected all past related content, like course stats, feedbacks, testimonials, social media.
- Created a _"case for action,"_¹ where we gathered arguments to convince the main stakeholders.
Structuring
- Created a mind map with our main concerns, which we named "The Worry Tree". It is like a premortem, but simpler. We created it using the Whimsical app.
- Defined the community’s "domain": getting better at SQL.
- Defined the community’s "name": Fluent SQL.
- Defined the community’s _"main intent"_¹: helping each other to solve everyday problems. (in the future, we might shift the intent to the knowledge-stewarding type).
- Defined the community’s "coordinator": me – the person who recorded the course, who has a personal interest in the role, and who is known by a large part of the members.
- Created a "job description" document describing the community’s coordinator role and responsibilities.
- Created a PowerPoint file named "Survival Guide" with instructions, checklists, and our community’s minimal rules of coexistence.
- Created a quick course named "Invitation Course" with five multiple-choice exercises to test their understanding of the Survival Guide.
First Members
- Created the #badhus-cop-fluent-sql Slack channel (_"CoP"_ stands for Community of Practice).
- Created a _"case for membership,"_¹ where we gathered arguments to help potential members to see the value in interacting and contributing to a community.
- Hand-picked the first 30 potential members, based on: people who showed knowledge-sharing behaviors in the #badhu Slack channel; different current level current of SQL knowledge; referrals from the Data team members; a mix of gender, ethnicity, job area, and role.
- Invited the members in batches of 15, inferring that up to 5 of them will decline the invite by time constraint reasons.
- Scheduled a 30-minutes call to explain about Community of Practice and officially invited them personally. We shared the Survival Guide and Invitation Course in anticipation.
- On the following Monday, we invited those who have completed the Invitation Course to the private Community of Practice Slack channel.
Activity and Engagement
- Created an "Activity’s Suggestions Deck" document with step-by-step ideas that members can execute to generate activity and engagement in the community.
- Mirrored the HeyTaco recognizing mechanic using Zapier to let a member officially thank someone for some valuable contribution. Whenever someone sends a message like "@name thanks! 🌮 ", we compute a point to @name. Detail: we exchanged :taco: emoji by :coxinha: emoji because it is a very beloved food in Brazil.

Metrics
- Created some Zaps to collect and save the Slack channel messages and interactions.
- Defined the metrics better related to our goals.
- Created a simple report using Google Sheets to monitoring our metrics.
Note: we opted for Zapier and Google Sheets in order to follow our 6-week time constraint. We plan to pay this technical debt in a subsequent project, using our platform tools stack (Databricks, Airflow, and Tableau)
The Future is Data-Driven
We will explore it more, invite new members and provoke them to learn and share more and more. I can imagine these business people have not realized yet how much they have learned and that they are on the path to becoming singular professionals in their field.
For me, it is a pleasure to work on this type of initiative, connecting Learning theories with Technology, while boosting iFood data literacy level.
References
[1] E. Wenger, R. McDermott and W. Snyder, Cultivating Communities of Practice (2002), Harvard Business Review Press
[2] YouTube: HR meets science at Google with Prasad Setty