Setting up Centre of Excellence

Why?
The IT landscape is vast and disruptive. The change is so fast and disruptive that technologies of today get obsolete and new innovative technologies emerge. Keeping up with change with the pace of technology change is a full-time job.

Recently several IT companies have started with the trend of setting up CoE for various IT Practices. These CoEs are organized as supporting group to IT Project Deliveries. These CoEs are usually maintained as shared corporate group to service the Delivery Groups which service the customers. They are also organized as horizontals which provide the cross-cutting expertise to the Delivery groups.

The main concept of CoEs is to build skills and competency on the shared line, which could be organized based on the requirement of exploring or change in the space, to sustain the execution of their initiatives in projects. The CoE brings to the table their competency to provide guidelines, principles, methodology, best practices and architecture decision support.

Types?
CoEs can be of many types.

·         Technology specific
-          Area specific: Application Server, Web Servers, Databases, Data warehouse, Cloud … are organized keeping in mind the products of similar types are usually similar although from different vendors. The best practices of a product in one space usually apply to all products.
-          Vendor specific: Oracle, Microsoft, IBM,  … these CoE try to leverage the accumulated experience of resources working on specific vendor products due to mapping with customer product specific requirements.

·         Service specific
-          Project Lifecycle
o   Developers, (Java,.Net or LAMP) which brings the development best practices to the project. These CoEs explore the new frameworks in respective languages, train and keep the resources up-to-date, and maintain the best practices in development methodology these platforms. They promote the optimum and right way of using the technology, its tools and associated product in the development life cycle.   These CoE may be only academic providing the training and guidelines or may support staff augmentation.
o   Testers, from Testing CoE community, brings the experience of testing. It could bring in the expertise of testing space- automation, manual, tools for functional, performance testing etc.
o   Architecture, from architecture CoE community, brings the experience of Architecture creation. This CoE
-          Datacenter, Infrastructure and Networking  Services
-          Solution & Strategy Services


Setting up
·         Charter
o   Strategy & Vision, Setting up a Mission statement, charter, and goals clarify the purpose and scope of the COE. Ensures the vision of COE aligns with business strategy and maintains a set of key technology themes for their line. It defines various business problem will the CoE solve.
o   Establish broad  scope of activities
o   Establish and monitor standards setting process, and a means of communicating those standards, a way of monitoring adherence to the standards, and a process by which standards can be challenged and evolved
o   Mode of working, define establish procedure for relationship with other CoE, SME and Project groups
o   Governance and Monitoring - Establish and effective governance process to ensure CoE provided guidelines and standards are being applied
o   Evaluate tools, products, and architecture making recommendations and incorporating approved items into the IT standards and guidelines and fostering its usage promoting development of a Centre of Excellence in IT standards and governance

·         Secure Sponsorship and funding from Senior Management
An initial investment invisible support, time and funds are necessary for any cultural change in an organization. Setting up of CoE is no different and needs continual support from senior management to push CoE agenda through; this could be in form of initial mandate or incentive to use the CoE services.
Aligning the other departments favorably towards new CoE helps in the evolution of CoE and building its credibility.
Many of CoE have failed due to-
-          Lack of visible sponsorship from senior management
-          Lack trust with various departments
-          Political issues like existing department refusing to let go

·         Selecting Leadership and Organize the COE
Some other top reasons for failing of a CoE initiatives:
-          Weak leadership leading to ineffective decision-making process
-          Not anticipating and proactively solving people issues
-          Not right skilled people are involved

Hence, selecting a right leader and supporting him to set up a CoE is the top most reason for failing of CoE initiative. Leadership selection must be based on skill rather than based on political affiliations.

·         Making CoE Operational
(specific to CoE)

·         Governance
Any process without monitor can provide last minute surprises.  With CoE operational and a defined time frame provided before CoE can start providing its returns, a governance team may be set up to monitor the CoE working as per its charter. This may be a forum to thrash out start-up issues like inter-departmental issues, people issues, infrastructure to support (with the appropriate tools and training), and transfer of activities to new CoE etc.

·         Marketing the COE
CoE is like an organization or separate entity and may require some marketing by its team to spread awareness about its strength, a rich repository of frameworks, case studies, which promotes is usefulness to the other departments.
After initial, setting up support from senior management, CoE competency and credibility will carry it forward. CoE may also use its marketing material to sell its service directly to an external customer based on its maturity for advisory support and consultancy in addition to supporting project teams.

·         Measuring CoE performance
Any planned organization initiative needs to prove its ROI to be continued. This cannot be successful without baselining/metric/system to measure progress. Hence, before the start of CoE based on decided realizable benefits metric needs to be agreed upon to measure the success of the CoE initiatives.
This metrics system should be in place for any CoE initiative to measure it own initiative success measure.

·         Optimizing CoE
This step completes the CoE cycle of PDCA plan–do–check–adjust. CoE with measuring its performance and its various initiatives should analyze the outcome and optimize services based on its working.