An organizations center of excellence may begin as an “informal body” comprised of experienced and knowledgeable personnel from the practice, but over time, the COE should get additional powers on the basis of noted contributions to successful projects and receive additional funding to expand the scope of its operations.
The following are the “CoE Ten Commandments” -adapted from the article “Setting up a Center of Excellence, considerations and analysis” by Ravi Subramanian of IBM.
- The CoE shall provide guidelines on how projects should be approached and assist in conducting detailed activities on modeling, development, or deployment.
- The CoE shall establish individual teams within the practice to lead specific activities.
- The COE shall look at design and other aspects from a quality assurance perspective and will have enforcement powers in this regard.
- The COE shall supervise the training and certification of designers and developers.
- The COE shall have funding and powers and be staffed as a full-time operation with dedicated resources.
- Knowledgeable and experienced business and technical members from other parts of the organization shall support and participate in the COE.
- The COE shall be a shared resource with staff members participating and contributing actively to all key projects.
- The COE shall be vested with wide powers of enforcement with regard to design decisions, best practices, quality control, and testing approaches.
In upcoming posts I will discuss each of the above in detail.
Happy Thanksgiving!
