If your organization has implemented a center of excellence initiative, that’s great! But what should you expect from it?
Here are 5 basic CoE objectives:
Sharing
Your Center of Excellence should continually strive to identify “practical assets” revealed during project work that could simplify or improve the efforts of the practice it supports.
These assets – which can be intellectual or physical – will then be “ripened”, shared and if unique enough, branded by the practice and introduced to the industry at large generating revenue directly through sales dollars or indirectly by establishing practice recognition.
Measure
A Center of Excellence must develop the ability to tangibly measure performance of all efforts within the practice, marketing it’s strengths while reengineering the practice weak areas.
Govern
When it comes to solution approach, development structure and style, a center of excellence should possess the ability to “rule over” the practice. The CoE is the “governing body” that will cast the deciding vote on all significant practice decisions.
Support
A Center of Excellence will support the practice through regular “health checkups” of it’s individual resources, developing and maintaining both technology and skillset “depth charts” and identifying subject matter experts within the practice.
Guide
A Center of Excellence should develop and introduce standards and mythologies for estimating effort levels, documentation, solution assurance, unit and system testing, environment migration, coding, planning and performance tuning based upon its best practical experience and industry standards.
