Automation community of practice: Tips and best practices

Congratulations! You've decided to create, take over, or grow your company's internal community of practice for Ansible Automation Platform. Whether you're just starting or looking to expand, here are several best practices to enable success and overcome obstacles.

It's a marathon, not a sprint

Building and sustaining a community of practice requires consistency to overcome the inertia of existing habits. As the saying goes, “ideas are a dime a dozen, but execution is everything.” This rings especially true when trying to change muscle memory for large organizations.

Your default IT culture may be siloed with information hoarding rather than sharing and collaboration. Since a community of practice is inherently grassroots, it's unlikely you'll have top-down executive mandates compelling participation. Instead, you need to create incentives and show clear benefits for teams to opt in voluntarily. Even then, the level of engagement may vary depending on participants' time and resource constraints.

Thus, patience and consistency is key. Whether your community of practice meets monthly, bi-monthly, or quarterly, follow these tips:

• Record every session and make it available for those unable to attend (even if only a few people show up, record it!). Refer back to these sessions as needed, for example recording a session on “how to onboard to Ansible Automation Platform” will be infinitely useful as new team members join
• Establish a regular schedule with varied agendas and publish it for all to see. For example, alternate between open technical Q&A sessions, demonstrations of specific use cases, and presentations from existing users showcasing their deployments and derived benefits such as quality of life improvements
• Leverage external partners such as Red Hat subject matter experts (SMEs) or other vendors familiar with Ansible Automation Platform to demonstrate use cases for the various Red Hat Ansible Certified Content. Partners in the ecosystem include companies such as AWS, Cisco, Cyberark, F5, Microsoft, VMware and others too such as key system integrators you may already have relationships that know the Ansible Automation Platform

Meet your community where they are

Take a people-first approach. If your community of practice is in its early stages, focus on enabling newcomers, reducing the barrier to entry. Even as topics become more advanced, such as automation mesh delivering automation to remote execution nodes in hybrid clouds, ensure that the culture of the meeting space always remains accessible to those just starting their Ansible Automation Platform journey. There are no wrong questions and everyone is welcome!

As one Ansible practitioner shared at AnsibleFest 2024:

"...We realized our approach to automation might offer a real opportunity to bring us all a little closer together. Thereafter, our first monthly community meeting was born with teams from across the company—from those managing legacy mainframe systems to those orchestrating containerized applications -- came together. Lots of ideas were exchanged, content was shared, but most importantly, automation was bringing our people together." —Joe Petruska, director, Automation and Analytics Tools at ADP Watch here

Be transparent, inclusive, and egoless

A common pitfall is when a centralized IT team, responsible for enterprise wide automation, takes on the role of community of practice leadership with a top-down approach. A community of practice thrives on openness, transparency, and collaboration—it's about nurturing the community, not dictating guidelines.

A community of practice should also foster inclusivity. Whether users are beginners or advanced practitioners, the community of practice must remain a welcoming space, not a place for zealots to discuss ‘their’ way of automation.. A specific concrete example may be discussing different ‘landing zones’ for users to migrate homegrown DIY bash scripts to idempotent Ansible Playbooks. Depending on an individual's familiarity and time, utilizing the shell module to orchestrate and kick off the automation may be a great first, small step versus asking (and judging) that individual to completely refactor their existing automation the “proper” way. Small steps lead to larger steps.

Transparency can take the form of sharing internal roadmaps for how to deploy Ansible Automation Platform or creating opportunities for beta testing new features. Because Ansible Automation Platform is a popular open source technology, some users may disagree with how it is deployed internally versus how it’s set up in their home labs or dedicated environments they control.

For advanced users, offer avenues for them to share their insights while ensuring they don't monopolize discussions, openly explaining the technology and process dependencies for Ansible Automation Platform internally. Here is also an opportunity to craft and re-iterate the community of practice social contract.

Finally, breakout groups can be helpful, especially for users in specialized areas, such as those dealing with differing network topologies or security compliance constraints. These groups allow for targeted discussions while still maintaining the larger community's focus.

Document and communicate your community of practice’s purpose

Clearly document and regularly restate the goals of your community of practice. Navy Federal Credit Union, for example, initially struggled with user adoption as they discussed at AnsibleFest in 2024. Only after reshaping their mission and focusing on community-building did they achieve broader buy-in from the organization.

As another practitioner states their goal below, it’s clear the community of practice is not about mandating to others what and how to automate, but about achieving broader goals.

"By fostering a culture of openness, transparency, and knowledge-sharing, we aim to streamline processes, reduce duplication of effort, and maximize automation across the enterprise."
—Craig Mitchell, SRE manager at Navy Federal Credit Union, Watch here

Make it clear why the community of practice exists and the value it brings to the participants. Reinforce these points regularly to ensure ongoing engagement and avoid technical deep-dive rabbit hole debates.

Foster collaboration, not competition

The community of practice is not only a place to solve common technical issues—it's also a space for relationship-building. By removing egos, you create a culture where all voices are valued, whether they're advocating for cutting-edge features or still using other technologies like homegrown bash scripts, Terraform, Python, or vendor-specific tooling from Oracle, Datadog, Microsoft, AWS, etc.

Allow room for collaboration across different levels of expertise and showcase how Ansible Automation Platform works often “better together” with other tools, orchestrating and stitching together disparate workflows as the glue or integration point. Celebrate contributions, no matter how small, and reward individuals who go out of their way to help others or bridge a community. For example, Ansible Automation Platform can alleviate workload pressures on the ServiceNow teams by acting as a common integration layer between other technologies, a very common pattern. However, internal politics or siloed cultures may lead teams to believe they compete with one another instead. Break that cycle by demonstrating the “better together” integration but also speaking to the overall mission of maximizing automation across the enterprise.

Finally, if there are those that proactively answer questions in your internal mailing list or chat room, elevate and reward them. Make them part of your community and highlight the specific behaviors to reinforce. 

From the AnsibleFest 2021 stage:

“When we started our [Ansible] community of practice, we had 20 people attending meetings. Now we have over 200. We hold breakout groups that focus on specific features or products and bring people together to learn from one another.” —Beth Boy, executive director, Global Technology at JPMorgan Chase & Co. Watch here

Make it fun!

A thriving community needs a dose of lightheartedness. Participation in a community of practice is voluntary and outside formal job responsibilities, it's important to make the experience enjoyable.

Consider awarding prizes or status symbols for contributions, such as branded merchandise or stickers from partners or titles like “Ansible Ninja Expert.” Use creativity in communication channels—does your intranet make the community of practice look inviting and fun?

Highlight the collaborative wins involving multiple teams with an AI-generated song or cupcakes with photos to share for all. A welcoming, collaborative atmosphere encourages engagement, and ensures sustainability for someone to continue returning. 

Conclusion

At Red Hat, we believe in the power of openness to unlock potential and foster collaboration. Many of these ideas and themes are detailed in the Open Practice Library, which includes frameworks like the Möbius loop for iterative development—tools that can help shape and strengthen your community of practice’s mission statement.

Red Hat can partner in a variety of ways too, from onboarding experts to Ansible Technical Account Managers (TAMs) hosting open Q&A or supporting an onsite/virtual workshop to bring everyone to the same baseline Ansible knowledge.

A successful community of practice is built on inclusivity, transparency, and consistent engagement. Meet your community where they are, make sure your external partners are part of that community as well —and most importantly—have fun along the way!

Additional resources

• Enable automation learning, productivity, and collaboration with Ansible plug-ins for Red Hat Developer Hub
• Learn how to adopt an automation developer mentality
• Get expert guidance on your automation journey with Red Hat Services