Christopher D. Williams

Good morning, everybody. My name is Christopher Williams. I'm with Northrop Grumman.

Dr. Suzette Johnson

And I am Dr. Suzette Johnson. And that's what the screen says. I'm an NG Fellow there for Lean-Agile and Digital Integration, and I specifically focus right now on our Space Systems sector, because there's nothing cooler right now than space.

Christopher D. Williams

Today we're going to be speaking about communities of practice at Northrop Grumman, and in particular the one that Suzette and I have been working here for the last 16 years, and how we've seen it grow and sustain through ups and downs, more ups, over the last 16 years.

Over 20 years ago at Northrop Grumman, we created a handbook to use across the entire organization on how to run communities of practice. Within that handbook, this was the description that has held up over time, because I believe right now that handbook hasn't been updated, I think, since 2013, but it's still relevant. I looked through it again, and it was like, wow, this is what we actually are doing, and a lot of our other CoPs are using too.

The one thing that jumps out at me when I look at this definition here about our community of practice that we've been working on for 16 years, along with the others, is the passion. All of our communities of practice that we have at Northrop Grumman, including our Lean-Agile CoP, we have passionate people across the organization who want to get together frequently, share what they've learned, connect with others, and we have found this to be a very powerful opportunity and approach to connecting over 100,000 employees, of which we have about 10,000 on our mailing list, every other week.

Looking at some of the benefits that we've seen across all of our CoPs over the last 16 years, we're trying to develop, share, and preserve that knowledge. Again, we have multiple sites across the country. We have a couple sites in the UK that we engage with. So how do we connect all these passionate people in a standard way frequently, so we can enhance those partnerships, promote that knowledge generation, and also promote these best practices, and just share what's working?

And sometimes what's not. We want to try to keep it on the positive side, but we have a lot of diverse programs. Our company has changed a lot over the last 16 years. In particular, as Suzette just mentioned, we've added space over the last four or five, so we've learned a lot of new opportunities from them. So how do we keep these benefits in front of everybody, and how do we provide and structure it all the time?

Dr. Suzette Johnson

Yeah. It's been such an exciting journey. When Chris talks about the passion, in a couple slides I'll tell you about how the journey got started, and it truly was about the passion that we felt and the passion for our mission.

I am curious, how many of you are familiar with Northrop Grumman?

Okay, so most of you. Just wanted to make sure there was a little bit of context there. So we have about 100,000 employees, that Chris had just mentioned. This has been an immense undertaking, and we'll tell you more about that journey.

Christopher D. Williams

So right now, I've looked across our company for the communities of practice I'm aware of, and also reaching out to others, and here are some of the more active ones that we have today. Some of them are very relevant to the context today. Our AI community of practice just started up recently, as we learned yesterday, on that huge change in our ways of working.

Our DevSecOps community has been very active, especially with things going on, as we learned this morning, with the Navy and the DevOps stuff they're doing in the Air Force.

But we've also had some other CoPs, and I don't think I told Suzette I had it before. There's been a CoP that's been around longer than us. I don't think they've been as active the whole time, but I was talking to our DOORS, for those that have been around IBM DOORS requirements management, especially if you've been in big company space. They've been around like 18 years now. They haven't been active that whole time, but lately they've been one of our most active CoPs. I lurk in their Teams channels when they're talking, and they're sharing DXL scripts and how they're producing these documents and reducing cycle time.

And most of these CoPs meet every month, occasionally more than that. And you wanted to talk about one in particular?

Dr. Suzette Johnson

Yeah. So one of our newest ones is Lead in the Digital Age community of practice. While we're going to be emphasizing the Lean-Agile CoP, I wanted to highlight this one just for a moment, because I and one of my coworkers have started this.

Because as you know, we have a core of coaches who are amazing, but the real change agents in the company are our middle-tier management. They're the ones that own the processes. They're the ones that manage the people.

So we had this idea of, what if we started a community of practice focused just on their needs in terms of having to work diligently towards program excellence, being aligned with Northrop Grumman's leadership behaviors, and the integration of digital capabilities coming out of our digital transformation? And that is the focus of this Lead in the Digital Age. Again, it focuses on our middle tier, and we also have coaches that come in, because then we can also emphasize the importance of relationship between the coaches that are supporting our programs and the managers who have the responsibility for delivering in those environments.

So I'm pretty excited about that, but I'll leave that for a talk another day.

Christopher D. Williams

Yeah. And while right now these are the ones that are active, doing some archeological digging through wikis and other things, we've had over 80 CoPs over the years that have come and gone.

Again, they're all voluntary. They don't show up on org charts. So depending on the topic, some topics are more relevant in certain contexts. Sometimes they just fade away because the person running it decided to do something different and they couldn't pick it up.

But again, we've seen the ebb and flow of these CoPs over the years, and a lot of different topics. So in particular, what we're going to focus on now is the 16 years that Suzette and I have spent growing and sustaining our Lean-Agile CoP.

Dr. Suzette Johnson

Great. So let's talk about how we got started.

We needed to go back in time. The year is 2006. I am much earlier in my career at that time, and I'm working on a program. We had brought Ken Schwaber in, and we understood Agile for software. I had about 150 people, part of an 800-person program.

The interesting challenge was, though, I was the systems engineering manager. I was not the head of software, although I was kind of coaching them through this process with the support we had gotten from Ken Schwaber.

But I had a problem. The problem was trying to figure out how do I do systems engineering in this environment? Because one, I've got the software that's running ahead of us, and we're like, "Well, wait a minute. We need some systems engineering." We had true requirements, like security requirements, things like that. We needed to make sure we're getting communicated to the teams, some level of modeling. But our models were actually playing catch-up. And I'm like, "Well, this is not exactly the way this should be working."

So I thought, well, let me get together with what I call the really smart engineers in the company. But like I said, it's 2006, early in my career. So I go to my VP, and I was like, "Hey, I need some help. I want to get together some of the really smart engineers in my company to talk through the challenge that I'm facing and figure out how can we do this better. So may I call this meeting together? Is that okay? Who should I ask permission from?"

And this was a truly pivotal moment of my career. We talked about leadership. He was an amazing leader, because his response was, "If what you're doing is for the good of our company and for our customer, I don't need you to ask for permission. But what I do want you to do is keep me informed, and when you have a solution that you want to take to our customer, I will pave that way for you."

So I have been living on those words ever since, because it was so powerful. I'm like, he trusts me. He trusts me to make good decisions. Like, oh my gosh.

Then as I was walking out the door, I was like, well, that went way better than I thought. So I looked back and I was like, "Sir, can I expense lunch so that they show up?" He was like, "Sure." And I was like, all right.

And they showed up. We started as a team of like 20 people who were also very passionate about delivering these capabilities to our customer and how we could do things better. So that was so important to have the need, the leadership support. We were aligned around a common mission.

Then what happened is, all of a sudden it started getting a little notice from what I'll call some folks at corporate. They came in because we were just 20 people trying to do this thing, and they're like, "You know, we have formal communities of practice in this company. We'd like to work with you to make it a formal community of practice versus something you're doing just at your site."

So if you go to the next slide, SEAG is Systems Engineering Advisory Group. It is a corporate, they have a different name now, but it is a corporate team, a corporate group that advises and provides the guidance on systems engineering, the handbook. They sponsored us initially. So by 2008, I now had the corporate sponsorship that I needed, and it was like everything was kind of aligned to move us forward.

Christopher D. Williams

Yeah. So when we started, as Suzette just mentioned, in 2008, it was a very small group, informal. People would hear about it. We had a mailing list eventually that people would get added onto.

We did meet. First meetings you said were in person, right? That was actually before I joined the group. But eventually everything started going to more remote. We went through all the pains of Lync, Skype, WebEx, pick your favorite technology before COVID, to do that.

We did meet every other week, and Suzette was very passionate about meeting every other week and not canceling meetings. I think in our 16 years, there's probably less than 10 times we've canceled a meeting, which was a struggle with me here this week. We had a meeting today, and we didn't have a topic before I left, but we did get one. So no canceled meeting today.

Again, it was very organic. We weren't very intentional with the growth. As you can see the little bar chart there, it was just our attendance. We averaged 30. We got up into the seventies, the average number of people attending. It all depended on the topic. Sometimes there was less. Sometimes there was more.

We also were very intentional to try to use our network to bring in external speakers. So at least a couple times a year, we do bring in some externals. Eventually, with this organic growth, we grew to about 1,000 people by the time early 2019 came.

Dr. Suzette Johnson

Yeah. And so to build on that, it was very intentional. I've talked with some people that know me well, and they're like, "Suzette, I think everything you do is intentional." Because I think. I think a lot, and I think hard.

I was like, this is community. So community means friendships. It means connecting. It means empowering and offering opportunities to others.

There have been many times on December 31st, as we're moving into the new year, for years I would sit and I would reflect on the year. On January 1st, I would send it out to the team and say, "Hey, here's a reflection of all the great things that this community has done together."

But I highlight that because I truly believe in the personal touch, which has been a little bit harder as we talk about how large we've gotten. But think about what community means and what does that mean to you, and most importantly, what does it mean to the people that are coming and being part of this group? And what are their expectations from it?

Christopher D. Williams

So 2019 came, and the big T word came up. We had started our Agile transformation. So there was a little bit more focus on, we know there's a community out there, how do we start engaging it some more?

We started moving things around. Previously, we were very East Coast-centric, just because the people ran it. Even though we did have good West Coast attendance, we started flip-flopping the times.

We also renamed it to the Lean-Agile CoP to start bringing in more of our Lean parts of our organization.

We had this huge, we've been doing training for years, and we started to look and say, hey, we have thousands, now over 12,000 people basically, that have gone through some basic Lean or Agile training in our company. So if they've gone through that training, they must have some interest in what we're doing. So right now, part of our CONOP is every quarter, anybody who's new that's taken training, they get added to our community of practice mailing list. So right now we've got about 12,000 people on that list.

Probably HR doesn't know that we have 12,000 people. That's about a tenth of the company we're emailing every other week. But again, it's very organic, and it gives a wide audience, because we look at the numbers and we do have a lot of variation on people from across the company, depending on the topic, when they come.

Then you also notice during the COVID years, a lot more people started to attend. But it started to flatten out a little bit. Also, we've started to get to community of practice more often, so there's a lot of pressure on people's time, depending on what they go to, whether it's SRE, DevOps, now AI.

Also, ZoomGov has been a blessing to try to manage these large calls versus trying to do anything with Skype or Microsoft Teams.

Looking at the numbers throughout the year, I will thank Suzette for starting an Excel spreadsheet back in 2008 of just when we had a meeting and how many people attended. We've kept that spreadsheet moving and growing.

You'll see here, we've had over 380 meetings, over 50,000 attendees over the years. Again, our mailing list. We've also got a good breakdown of speakers. These are unique speakers we've had present. So over 180 different people throughout the company over the last 16 years have had the opportunity to share their passion with our organization.

Then from the external side, again, we've had from all different industries, both related to Department of Defense and others. We've had Jason Cox, Gene Kim. Who else? Well, you name-dropped some others. Robin.

Dr. Suzette Johnson

Oh yeah. Robin. Yes. Robin.

Christopher D. Williams

Debbie Brau.

Dr. Suzette Johnson

So I mentioned them because Robin was from Lockheed, and Debbie Brau was from Boeing, right? Some people have questioned that at times, like, "You're bringing in our competitors." I'm like, first of all, we're competimates. Sometimes we compete, sometimes we partner and we're team members. And at the end of the day, we are better together, because I want us to be successful as a defense community as well.

Christopher D. Williams

Also, Jon Smart in the front row here has also presented. So we want to make sure we hear these industry voices. I mean, we're lucky enough to be able to come to these presentations and conferences like this. Not everybody that we work with does. So we try to bring that back as much as we can.

So if you're looking to go on this journey and want some lessons to help you accelerate that, here's what we've learned over the last 16 years.

One of the big things is care. You've got to have that passion, because it's not easy. Starting a CoP is really easy. Keeping it going more than six months is hard. Because you'll have all those topics set up, like, "Oh yeah, I know who's going to present. We've got this and that." And all of a sudden, you start looking at your calendar, it's like, "Huh. You've got a lot of coming soons. Who are we going to get to fill that?"

So caring, making sure the community is involved. You can't just have it be personality-driven or the same people presenting every other time.

Also, Suzette mentioned leadership, right? Some of these communities of practice are purely homegrown. They didn't talk to anybody. They just organically formed. But then others have been more intentional, like ours and others.

Mentioned don't cancel meetings if you can avoid it, because as soon as you start canceling meetings, people start forgetting about you. They don't think, "Oh, they're not meeting this week." You just sort of fade away. And I think that's sort of, looking at some of the other CoPs that have gone away, one person was driving it. They didn't have a committee, or not really a committee, but at least two or three people to help drive it. They sort of got missing meetings, and all of a sudden they just stopped.

Dr. Suzette Johnson

Yeah. It kind of goes back to the principle of cadence and synchronization, right?

Christopher D. Williams

Yeah. And then the other thing too is, figure out some measures to capture early on. We were doing the bare minimum, like when did we meet? How many people were there?

Now also, because the tooling's improved, we can see what parts of the organization people are from. We know what sectors, the roles. Hey, did we have any directors or VPs show up?

We also do a survey once a year right now to gather some feedback, also for topics for the following year. Also, looking at our mailing list has been interesting, especially from an attrition point of view, just to see, as we see in our organization in general, it's not just the adds. What are the net losses that we've seen over the years? And it's real. Probably we see, just like the organization, 10 to 12% of our mailing list turn over every year.

Lastly, show appreciation. We have a nice little internal system that allows us to send out a thank you, and we make sure we do that after every call. Make sure that their manager knows they presented. We show some of the metrics, that hey, so many people showed up. Thanking people. It's those little things that people really appreciate.

Dr. Suzette Johnson

So tying this to the business, yes, building community is nice, but how has this contributed to the business in Northrop Grumman?

So here you can see our timeline, again starting with my team in 2005, and then how we built that community of practice in 2006. Our official birthday is actually January 23, 2008. That's when we were officially recognized by the enterprise, and it has continuously just grown from there.

You can see from there, so we have a community of practice, right? Community of practice is like lunch and learns, people sharing ideas. But then we launched our center of excellence, and that was around 2011. That center of excellence is closely tied with the community of practice, but the center of excellence is what helps our teams and our enterprise move forward with these practices according to their needs, and provides the guidance.

We've continued with our coaches. You can actually, right, because if we could do some correlations, you would see as we are adopting more and more in the company, there's also the increase of coaching. Because we've got 100,000 people, and we were supporting 300 programs plus. We continue to support over billions of dollars in programs.

What we're doing now is really looking closely within all of those billions of dollars of programs that we're supporting, where specifically are we showing the most momentum and the most adoption? And then who is the next nearest neighbor? So that as we move forward, we can focus on where is the kind of emergence happening, which you can kind of figure if you're familiar with our industry, starts in software and then moves out to systems engineering and hardware and manufacturing. So that's the journey that we're on, and it's been an amazing journey.

Down there you can see the Lead in the Digital Age community of practice that emerged recently, because we recognize the importance of managers as being part of the change, but also being the coaches of their people. And now the coaches help coach the managers, so managers can really coach the people on a day-to-day basis, not just when there's a coach present.

Christopher D. Williams

Yeah. Also along with Lead in the Digital Age, definitely engaging our Lean community. We do a lot of manufacturing. I've got a software background, so never really part of those parts of the organization. But we have industrial engineers working on very complex manufacturing opportunities for some of the weapon systems we build.

So how do we pull them in? Because there's a lot of great things they're doing, and also we can learn from each other. A lot of the techniques that the Lean community uses, especially continuous improvement, we've been trying to pull them in and just show different examples.

Again, a lot of times, especially early on, "Oh, it's Agile. It's just software." But definitely trying to pull people in from different organizations.

Including this year, one of the other things we did is every year Northrop Grumman does company-wide awards for excellence. As part of that award criteria, Agile is mentioned multiple times. So one of the things we did this year is we reached out to all the award winners and said, "Hey," there's 12, 14 of them, "we'd love to have you speak at our community of practice." And we've got three or four of them presenting, but they're all different parts of the company.

We had one that's going to be, the last one was a space launch system from NASA, talking about what they did there. We have our HR organization. They just did a big transformation and upgrade for how they do their work. They're going to present. So just trying to make sure that we reach out in the community.

We also pull in sometimes topics that aren't completely Lean-Agile, just so our community can get awareness of what's going on within the company.

Dr. Suzette Johnson

Yeah. And as you were talking, one of the things that you made me think of, one of the things we started, I couldn't tell you a date. I know it's been probably at least eight years, because it was well before the pandemic, is we get together once a year in person for a couple days, and we invite the community for our own internal Lean-Agile Summit.

It has now kind of moved to more virtual. I long for the days where we can get back in person, but the virtual presence is actually nice, because for people that don't have sometimes the funding to travel, they now have the opportunity to participate. But again, it goes back to building community.

Christopher D. Williams

Yep.

Our closing read is, "Fostering a community of practice empowers our employees to learn, grow, innovate, resulting in an organization that can thrive and evolve in an ever-changing world."

Dr. Suzette Johnson

And as I'm reading that, it makes me think, for those of you that might have sat with me at breakfast, I joke that, hey, I used to think we were going to be done in 2015. But it does continuously evolve and change. And like we heard yesterday, what changed since February?

Christopher D. Williams

The AI space.

Dr. Suzette Johnson

Yeah. So we have some time for--

Christopher D. Williams

Also, we didn't put it on here, but call for help. One of the things we're always looking for is people to present.

Dr. Suzette Johnson

Yeah. So if you have a topic that you're passionate about and would like to present to our Lean-Agile community of practice, or any of those others that I shared earlier, please reach out. You can find me here. I'm in LinkedIn. We'd love to have you present at our communities.