Building a Learning Organization: Three Phases of Communities of Practice in a Software Consulting Company

Special interest groups or communities of practice are seen as important mechanisms for knowledge sharing in the knowledge management literature. However, there are few empirical studies of communities of practice in the software engineering field. This article presents an action research project in a small size software consulting company, where the organization of the learning activities went through three phases, where different models were tried out and evaluated. We discuss the models in relation to community of practice theory to explain the learning effect of the models. A flexible model for organizing knowledge-sharing seems to provide the greatest learning effect