Bentley Systems did not begin building internal Communities of Practice (CoP) as a reaction to a problem.
They did it because they saw an opportunity.
As a global engineering software company with highly specialized teams, Bentley already had deep knowledge distributed across the organization.
Cross-team learning and informal knowledge sharing were happening naturally, but the question leadership asked was how to support that work in a way that would scale, remain sustainable, and fit within a delivery-driven environment?
Rather than letting Communities of Practice grow informally and hoping they evolved in the right direction, Bentley chose to be intentional from the start. They wanted clear operating models, practical ways to understand engagement, and systems that would not depend on individual heroics to succeed over time.
That is where Stateshift came in.
Over the course of two years, Stateshift worked alongside Bentley’s community leaders and leadership team to design a repeatable, measurable system for internal Communities of Practice. Not a one-off playbook, but a foundation Bentley could own, operate, and continue to evolve.
As Bentley Chief Technology Officer Julien Moutte reflected:
“Stateshift had an enormous impact with our internal Communities of Practice initiative by not just providing clear strategic guidance, but also pragmatic, practical support at a tactical level. This helped us significantly speed up time to results and exceed expectations.”
This case study looks at how Bentley Systems partnered with Stateshift to take a systematic approach to internal Communities of Practice, and what other organizations can learn from building communities that scale without relying on individual heroics.
Throughout this case study, we refer to Bentley’s internal Communities of Practice as internal CoPs. These internal CoPs brought together employees across teams to share knowledge, develop skills, and collaborate without changing formal reporting structures.
Why Bentley Invested in Internal Communities Early
Bentley operates in a complex environment.
The company supports many products, serves highly specialized markets, and employs teams with deep domain expertise. That depth is a competitive advantage, but it can mean knowledge often stays within individual groups.
Leadership recognized that bringing people together around shared practice could accelerate learning, improve collaboration, and help employees develop skills beyond their immediate roles. Bentley saw internal CoPs as a way to accelerate learning and collaboration without reorganizing teams or changing reporting structures.
The primary constraint though, was time.
Bentley is a delivery-driven organization. Employees have clear responsibilities, full calendars, and measurable objectives. For internal communities to succeed, participation needed to feel worthwhile, not like an added obligation.
Bentley also recognized a structural risk. Communities of Practice are often led by people who care deeply about the topic, but still have full-time roles and delivery commitments. Without shared frameworks or practical ways to understand engagement, it becomes difficult to sustain momentum or see which communities need support.
Rather than learning those lessons the hard way, Bentley chose to invest in systems early. The goal was clear operating models, repeatable workflows, practical metrics within existing tools, and approaches that would work regardless of who happened to be leading a given community.
What Bentley Needed from a Strategic Partner
Bentley could try to build this capability internally through trial and error, or they could partner with a team that already understood how to scale community work across complex organizations. The goal was not to launch a few internal CoPs and hope they survived, but to build a system that could support many internal CoPs over time, regardless of who was leading them.
They were also clear about what they wanted to avoid:
- No generic playbooks.
- No one-time recommendations.
- No long-term dependency on external consultants.
What they needed instead fell into three areas.
First, strategic guidance for leadership. Bentley wanted clarity on what healthy internal Communities of Practice actually look like, how to measure engagement within the scope of tools like Teams and SharePoint, and how to support community participation inside a delivery-focused organization.
Second, practical support for community leads. These leaders were subject matter experts, not professional community managers. They needed concrete guidance on running events, maintaining engagement, and addressing challenges without adding unnecessary overhead.
Third, a system Bentley could own and continue to evolve independently.
That is why the work was structured as a strategic partnership. Rather than delivering predefined playbooks, Stateshift worked alongside Bentley’s teams over time, helping them build capability through practice and iteration.
How the Partnership Worked in Practice
The engagement centered on creating a shared learning loop among CoP leads.
Firstly, Stateshift facilitated regular working sessions that brought community leaders together across different practice areas.
These sessions were not status updates or reporting meetings. They were working sessions where leads shared experiments, discussed challenges, and learned from each other’s results. These working sessions brought together leads from different internal CoPs, allowing patterns and lessons to travel across the organization instead of staying siloed.
These sessions were crucial – they were a peer learning model that quickly reduced isolation.
Now CoP leads stopped solving problems alone and when one community tested a new approach, the outcomes were shared with the group. When something did not work, the group diagnosed it together.
At this early phase of the engagement, Stateshift focused on three tactical areas.
The first was designing internal virtual events that respected time constraints. Bentley employees already spent significant time in meetings. Community events needed to feel intentionally different. Interactive, focused, and clearly worth attending. These events were important to enable staff to exchange body language and build trust, which are the foundations of healthy communities.
The second was increasing participation in existing Teams channels without adding more synchronous meetings. Most community value happens asynchronously but the challenge was maintaining momentum and making it easy for people to contribute when they had capacity.
The third was creating genuine reasons to participate beyond obligation. Internal communities compete with many other priorities. Engagement needed to offer something standard work interactions did not.
One experiment illustrated this clearly.
Multiple Communities of Practice collaborated on a virtual scavenger hunt. Employees joined breakout rooms in mixed teams and competed to find specific objects, validating each other’s results. The friendly competition increased energy, participation, and camera usage throughout the session.
This was not simply a fun activity. It demonstrated how intentional design influences behavior.
The format proved effective and was repeated in different forms. As communities matured, CoP leads expanded into other interactive formats and began inviting guest speakers and external experts, exposing members to perspectives they would not encounter in their day-to-day work.
The pattern became clear. Internal engagement improves when experiences are designed to feel distinct from standard meetings.
From Tactical Improvements to Systems Design
As community leads became more confident and programming improved, leadership needed clearer visibility.
Standard collaboration tools provided limited insight. Member counts and message volume did not reflect actual engagement or impact. Bentley needed a way to understand which communities were healthy, where to invest resources, and how community activity connected to broader goals.
At this stage, Stateshift expanded focus from tactical enablement to systems design.
Together, Stateshift and Bentley leadership defined what “healthy” meant for an internal Community of Practice. They identified engagement signals that could be tracked within existing tools and created reporting structures that provided clarity without adding administrative burden for CoP leads.
The System Stateshift Built with Bentley
Stateshift helped Bentley design a practical system for internal Communities of Practice. Not a single framework or playbook, but a set of connected components that made community work easier to run, easier to support, and easier to evaluate over time.
1. A clear operating model – communities of Practice were given a defined role inside the organization. They were positioned as strategic mechanisms for knowledge sharing, skill development, and cross-team collaboration, not informal side projects. This clarity helped leaders understand what communities were for and helped participants know what to expect.
2. Repeatable workflows for community leaders – instead of starting from scratch each time, community leaders had adaptable workflows and playbooks to work from. These patterns were not rigid templates. They were proven starting points that leaders could tailor to their context, reducing cognitive load and avoiding burnout.
3. Pragmatic engagement metrics within existing tools – rather than chasing vanity metrics, the focus was on signals that reflected real engagement. Within the scope of Teams and SharePoint, Bentley tracked consistency of activity, breadth of participation, and qualitative indicators showing whether community conversations influenced real work. The goal was to reduce long periods of inactivity and give leadership a clearer picture of community health.
4. Distinct views for leadership and operators – reporting was intentionally separated by audience. Leadership received high-level visibility into trends and outcomes. Community leaders received actionable insights they could use to adjust programming and engagement. This avoided over-reporting while still creating transparency.
5. Recognition and incentives that protected participation – Stateshift worked with Bentley to explore how community work could be acknowledged formally. This included rewards programs, performance conversations, and visible signals of organizational support. The aim was to make participation sustainable in a delivery-driven environment.
Throughout the engagement, Stateshift stayed realistic about tooling limitations. The focus was not on waiting for perfect analytics or new platforms, but on making the existing system work well enough to support consistent progress.
Implementation and Momentum
The system did not require a large upfront rollout. Instead, momentum built through a series of practical steps that compounded over time.
It started with regular rhythms. Regular community lead sessions created a consistent space to share what was working, talk through challenges, and learn from each other. That alone reduced isolation and helped community leaders feel more confident in their role.
From there, teams began running small experiments. Community leads tested new event formats, shared results with the group, and adjusted quickly based on feedback. Ideas that worked spread across Communities of Practice. Things that did not work became shared learning, not individual failures.
As activity increased, leadership alignment became more important. Clear expectations and agreed-upon success criteria helped prevent drift and ensured community work stayed connected to broader organizational goals.
Basic metrics tracking rounded out the system. Simple engagement signals, monitored consistently, revealed patterns over time and helped distinguish healthy communities from those needing support.
Meaningful progress appeared within three to six months. The full system matured over roughly two years, balancing early wins with the slower work of sustained behavior change.
Bentley’s Results
The results showed up across multiple dimensions.
CoP leads gained clearer guidance and felt less isolated. They had peers, proven patterns, and greater confidence in their ability to run sustainable communities.
Leadership gained visibility into real engagement. Conversations shifted from whether Communities of Practice were valuable to how successful approaches could be expanded.
Community participation became easier to justify and protect. The perception shifted from extra work to recognized strategic contribution.
Most importantly, success no longer depended on individual heroics. Communities could withstand leadership transitions, new leads ramped faster, and Bentley gained a repeatable system it could continue evolving independently.
Bentley Systems
Internal Communities of Practice, by the numbers
A snapshot of scale, participation, and activity across Bentley’s internal Communities of Practice.
Figures provided by Bentley Systems (2025). “Internal CoPs” refers to internal communities of practice.
What Stateshift Helped Bentley Build
Stateshift helped Bentley Systems design a scalable internal Communities of Practice system that included:
- A clear operating model aligned with leadership goals
- Repeatable workflows CoP leads could run without burnout
- Practical engagement metrics using existing tools like Teams
- A peer learning loop that reduced isolation and improved outcomes
What This Means for Other Organizations
Bentley’s experience shows what happens when internal communities are treated as systems rather than side initiatives.
Stateshift helps organizations move community work from goodwill and heroics to repeatable, measurable practice. Whether applied to internal Communities of Practice or external developer ecosystems, the same principles apply: intentional design, clear outcomes, and systems that scale.
FAQs: Building Scalable Internal Communities
How long does it take to build scalable internal Communities of Practice?
Building a sustainable system typically takes months, not weeks. At Bentley, early progress appeared within three to six months, with full maturity over roughly two years. Regular rhythms and simple metrics help demonstrate value early.
What metrics actually work for internal Communities of Practice?
Focus on engagement consistency rather than member counts. Track periods of inactivity, breadth of participation, and qualitative signals showing influence on work decisions.
How do you balance community work with existing job responsibilities?
Community participation needs explicit organizational support. Recognition, performance alignment, and visible permission to invest time are essential.
Do we need a community consultant or help building internal capability?
Organizations rarely need more community advice. They need repeatable systems that work inside real delivery constraints. At Bentley, Stateshift partnered with leaders and Community of Practice leads to build internal capability, not long-term dependency. The result was a system Bentley could own and continue running even as people, roles, and priorities changed.
Key Takeaway
Internal Communities of Practice scale when systems are built intentionally from the start. Bentley Systems demonstrated that investing in structure, metrics, and shared learning creates sustainable impact over time.
Aligning leadership expectations with practical, day-to-day support for community leads reduced burnout and made the work easier to sustain.
Curious how this would work in your organization? Book a discovery call and we’ll talk through how Stateshift helps teams build and scale internal Communities of Practice.
