What is a Center of Excellence?
A Center of Excellence (CoE) is a group inside an organization. The motto behind the CoE is to make the organization efficient to a particular area or field by which it can become more effective.
A good example of a COE is digital transformation, or the ITSM practice. If an organization thinks that digital transformation is important for their success, then they start developing a CoE around the capabilities that improve digital processes.
At the outset, processes are introduced for launch and option across the enterprise. As the CoE works the organizations get more opportunities, the work of CoE starts in one functional area then scales to other parts of business .The value proposition of a COE is minimal unless you go enterprise-wide.
Why would an organization consider creating a CoE?
The first reason organizations establish Centers of Excellence is standardization. The COE ensures consistency across the enterprise. This is especially important if the impetus for the COE is vital to the organization’s success. Within any organization, there are various functional areas.
Benefits of COE
Skills and Expertise
The Center of Excellence provides an entire organization with the skills and expertise needed to develop a specific competency within the business and provide training to the team. Helps create functional Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), provides technical skills, and offers project management capabilities.
An Implementation Approach
The Center of Excellence creates a known and understood approach to delivering and evolving solutions for an organization. A Center of Excellence encourages collaboration between all stakeholders involved.
Direction and governance
The Center of Excellence creates a governance framework that is used to steer and prioritize the road map within an organization and drive the ROI of both BAU and Projects. This includes identifying a steering committee, sponsors, other roles and the sign-off process. The Center of Excellence helps provide adherence to conventions, policies, and guidelines.
Access to Knowledge and Best Practices
Align our services to ensure that our customers receive best in class services with emphasis on a) Logical grouping of services b) operational efficiency; c) Cost effectiveness and d) Business Knowledge case and technical best practices, as well as a shared practical knowledge surrounding the .
Collaboration
The Center of Excellence promotes collaboration and use of the best practices around a specific focus area and delivers special expertise and advanced product and services offerings.
Cost
Helps reduce cost by centralizing resource skills.
Things you should be aware of before you build a CoE!
If you are building a CoE for your organization, first you should know about your aim and for what purpose you are building it. You can choose an area or a process or any one of your departments that matters in the improvement of your organization. After that you have to engage with the people who can understand your needs and can fulfill them. You make a plan and work properly on it, and track your progress.
The steps we followed were to create a dedicated project team, while identifying a team and manager who were best placed to accept change with a Process Owner, PM and Senior Leads. A governance was set up where the team would regularly meet with the sponsors and senior stakeholders from the customer side. Some of the processes could be eliminated or automated. We also cross trained the resources helping us create a pool of cross deployable resources which helped manage peaks better and to be able to do much more with the same set of resources. This resulted in substantial monetary savings, improved quality of service and better resource utilization.
Over the years I have had an opportunity to apply the learnings on setting up multiple COE’s in Service Desk, IPC, Reporting with great success.
Example of a challenge and how we surmounted it!!
While doing my first COE project as a Process Owner and Manager, for the Service Request and Access Management function. We approached the various stakeholders on the customer sider to apprise and take their buy-in.
Our approach of talking about substantial savings, and more efficient processes went down well with both the UK and Indian customers. However, the US customer was worried about one additional aspect, that of Information Security. The issues stemmed from the fact that as part of the project the teams in purview would work as one team whereas earlier, they used to work in SILOS.
This change entailed giving additional access to the staff from other units on US Systems. This was flagged as a potential security concern. In addition, the US team was worried about any potential dip in Quality of Service.
To address this, we took the following steps, ensuring the US got on board too. a) Arranged an initial call with the senior decision maker on the US side to apprise them of the facts viz. all our staff members were operating under the same InfoSec Policy. Moreover, we had enough checks and balances in the form of monitoring of privileged access and these same staff had been performing without any incidents for the last few years. b) Arranged a call between US and UK teams to further reinforce the message. c) Setup a Governance meeting twice every month. d) Agreed to take a step by step approach to ensure no dip in service. e) Established a robust accreditation process.
With these mechanisms in place we were able to complete setting up the Service Request and Access management Center of Excellence successfully and achieve huge productivity and quality of service benefits.