What a Community of Practice does

A Community of Practice is the sustained venue where the people who use, govern, and evolve the platform meet. Brokers, Site Owners, champions, and the Information Manager team gather regularly to share what's working, identify what isn't, and move the platform forward.

The CoP serves three functions, but in steady state one of them dominates:

Capability building. Especially during initial rollout, the CoP is where Brokers and Site Owners learn how to do their roles.
Best-practice exchange. Site Owners learn from each other. 'How did your area handle X?' is the most valuable question in the CoP.
Crowdsourced gap identification — the steady-state core. The platform launches with a baseline catalog (library templates, content types, taxonomies, workspace templates). The CoP is where the gaps in that baseline get surfaced and turned into catalog evolution. This is the single most important steady-state activity of the CoP.

Why crowdsourcing matters

No baseline catalog is complete. The library templates, content types, and metadata schemas that ship with the platform reflect what was visible when they were designed — not the full reality of how 30 business areas will actually use them.

Crowdsourcing is the mechanism that closes the gap. Site Owners and Brokers using the catalog every day notice what's missing, what's redundant, what doesn't fit their content. The CoP captures those observations; the IM Governance Body (Doc 2.1) reviews and approves changes; the catalog evolves rapidly based on real use.

Without this loop, the catalog ossifies. Business areas build shadow patterns to compensate. The standard stops being authoritative. With the loop running, the catalog gets better every quarter.

Composition

Brokers. All Brokers in the organization, central or distributed. The CoP is the main venue for keeping their decisions consistent across portfolios.
Site Owners. Site Owners from each business area. Especially valuable in the early months when they're learning the role.
Champions. Department champions who provide the user-side perspective.
Information Managers. The IM team co-organizes and provides expertise.
Optional — Tenant Admins. When platform-level changes are on the agenda, IT operators participate.

Decision point

Some organizations run two tiers — a small Broker CoP focused on approval consistency, plus a broader Site Owner CoP for general practice exchange. Two tiers works for larger orgs (50+ Site Owners). Single CoP works for smaller orgs.

Cadence and agenda evolution

Phase	Cadence	Agenda focus
Initial rollout (first 8 sessions)	Weekly or biweekly	Guided maturity. Each session covers one capability — content planning, library design, permissions, copy services. Site Owners build their sites with hands-on guidance.
Early steady state (next 6 months)	Biweekly	Hybrid. Some guided sessions on advanced topics (Power Automate, sensitivity labels, Copilot); others crowdsourced — what's working, what isn't.
Steady state	Monthly	Crowdsourced. Site Owners and Brokers bring topics, share patterns, raise issues. IM team facilitates and feeds findings back to platform improvements.

Initial 8 sessions — guided maturity

The first 8 sessions of the CoP are structured as guided maturity. Site Owners arrive with their pre-provisioned (empty) sites; each session adds capability and content.

Session 1 — Site walkthrough. Tour of a department hub, directorate site, division site. Where everything is, what each part is for.
Session 2 — Content planning. Designing your library structure, metadata, navigation. Hands-on with the Site Owner's actual content needs.
Session 3 — Adding libraries from the catalog. Walking through the Library Catalog, requesting libraries, configuring views.
Session 4 — Permissions and access. Default groups, when to break inheritance, requesting permission changes.
Session 5 — Copy service / migration support. How content from legacy systems gets into the right place.
Session 6 — Sensitivity labels and retention. How labels work, when to apply them, what retention means for the Site Owner.
Session 7 — Communicating to users. Site landing page, hub navigation maintenance, announcing new content.
Session 8 — Troubleshooting and Q&A. Open session for issues that have surfaced; consolidating learnings; transition to steady-state CoP.

Steady-state operation

After the initial 8 sessions, the CoP transitions to crowdsourced operation. The agenda is built from member-submitted topics, recent platform changes, and patterns the IM team has observed.

Topic backlog. Members submit topics through a shared list. IM team curates and sequences.
Open mic. Each session includes time for unstructured Q&A and pattern-sharing.
Platform updates. What's been changed since last session; what's coming.
Ongoing topics. Recurring themes — Copilot adoption, retention coverage, lifecycle activity, audit findings.

Feeding back into the platform — the gap-to-deployment loop

The CoP is the most valuable feedback channel the IM team has. The loop that turns CoP feedback into deployed change has four steps:

Step	Owner	Output
1. Surface the gap	Site Owners and Brokers in the CoP	Observation logged in the CoP backlog: 'we needed X but the catalog doesn't have it,' 'metadata Y is causing friction,' 'process Z needs automation.'
2. Triage and propose	Information Manager team between CoP sessions	Backlog items grouped, scoped, and turned into proposals — new template, taxonomy term, content type change, automation candidate.
3. Decide	IM Governance Body (Doc 2.1) — weekly or biweekly cycle	Approve, defer, or escalate to the main forum if the change touches platform-wide policy.
4. Deploy	IM team with IT support	Catalog updated, template deployed, taxonomy term added, automation built. CoP notified of the change.

What gets surfaced and acted on through this loop:

Library Catalog gaps. New library templates needed; existing templates refined or replaced.
Content type and metadata gaps. Required fields users find friction-heavy; missing fields they need; taxonomies that don't match their content.
Workspace template variants. Site or Team configurations that recurring use cases need.
Process automation candidates. High-friction manual processes that Power Platform could automate (covered further in Doc 4.7).
Documentation gaps. Quick-reference materials, FAQs, and playbooks that need to exist or be updated.
Operating model adjustments. Request flows, approval criteria, escalation paths that aren't working.

Cadence target

A healthy gap-to-deployment loop runs at days-to-weeks, not months. CoP surfaces a gap on Tuesday; IM Governance Body reviews it the following Tuesday; the change is deployed within two weeks. If the loop runs at months, business areas stop reporting gaps — they build workarounds instead, and the catalog drifts away from reality.

With Kybera Impact

The Library Catalog, workspace templates, and operating-model patterns Kybera Impact ships are themselves outputs of running CoPs across multiple deployments. CoP findings feed Kybera Impact evolution; Kybera Impact improvements seed new CoP sessions. The Workflow Engine deploys catalog updates within days of IM Governance Body approval.

Discussion Questions

• Who participates in our CoP — Brokers only, Site Owners, champions, all of the above?

• What's our cadence — weekly during rollout, monthly steady state, something else?

• Who chairs the CoP, and who organizes it?

• How do we capture topics, decisions, and outputs?

• How does the CoP feed back into platform improvements — formal channel, informal channel?

• What's our threshold for splitting into multiple CoPs (Broker CoP, Site Owner CoP) vs. one combined?

• How do we onboard new participants as they join over time?

• What recognition exists for active CoP participants?