Benefits and challenges of running a Centre of Excellence
Today’s webinar explores some of the advantages that organisations gain from implementing a Centre of Excellence.
For those that are not familiar, a Centre of Excellence (or CoE) brings together the expertise of many people within an organisation, in a way that it can easily be disseminated by making the knowledge accessible, discussed, shared, and ultimately, practiced.
There are challenges created by running a Centre of Excellence, which are easily observed and managed if you are aware of them.
Watch the video for more information.
Transcript:
Intro
Today we are talking about a centre of excellence and whether one is suited to your organisation.
A centre of excellence is where people come together to define best practices and standards for ways of doing work.
Often the information can be captured in a Wiki or some kind of live document. Usually accompanied by community meetings so that people share their learnings and their knowledge.
They are designed to raise the capability of people within your organisation to the highest level of the most experienced experts.
Today we will talk about some of the Pros and Cons that you need to be aware of if you’re planning on setting one up.
Pros
Faster onboarding = How do we do things here so that I can get up to speed and be productive sooner? Rather than interrupting team members to learn the basics.
Alignment = We have 15 different coaches all telling us to do things differently. A CoE can help gain alignment where it matters.
Self-serve education = Make learning a part of your process. Help people to self-identify knowledge gaps. Create capacity for learning and use it when it suits you.
Pooling knowledge = If you were to add up the years of knowledge of all of your staff, how much expertise would you suddenly have? Has another team already solved that problem?
Cross-training = If you aren't cross-training your teams, then a) they can't empathise with their team mates, and b) they can't cross-pollinate their skills and expertise.
Consistency = If people need to move between teams and you don't have consistency, then they spend days or weeks trying to understand how their new team works rather than just adding value straight away.
Systematise = Make learning a simple, easy to do process, with well-formed material, and then people are far more likely to adopt it.
Cons
This is more of a "be wary of" than “avoid”.
Inability to experiment = That's not how things are done here. Please go back and read the documentation.
Siloing by skills = Testers go over here. Business Analysts go over there. How do BAs learn about the challenges and needs of testing? How do they find the cross-over between competencies and a BA asks How can I make testing better? I have seen testers become BAs, BAs become Delivery Leads, Project Coordinators become BAs. How can we enable that if we are separating people out by skillset?
Resistance to new WOW = We don't need to re-learn how to do X, because we already figured out the best way. It’s only the best way until something better comes along. Often that comes from outside of the organisation.
Maintenance = How much effort, will go into maintaining the documentation and ensuring it's up to date?
One-size fits all = This is how we do X here, and it's the same for every team. Reality is that all teams have different and unique pressures and challenges that makes applying a consistent approach almost impossible, and often detrimental.
Similar to that – Let's force sameness = How do we get teams to have the same Sprint dates? Same velocity? Let's all agree that 1 Story Point equals 1 day of work.
Getting started
If you decide to set one up, here are the things that you need to think about:
Run it with a purpose, and check progress against the outcome/purpose.
Needs to focus on how people discuss, agree and gain alignment on topics.
How and when people can break out of existing process to experiment and learn.
I improve the performance of delivery teams.
