From Good to Great: How Centers of Excellence Propel Agile Success

In today’s hyper-competitive and rapidly evolving business landscape, organizations must continuously innovate and adapt to stay ahead. At the heart of this adaptability lies the cross-functional team model, a cornerstone of agile methodologies. These teams, equipped with diverse competencies, are the engines of value delivery. However, while frameworks like SAFe and Scrum emphasize the importance of cross-functional teams, they overlook a critical aspect: the development of individual skills and overall organizational competencies.

This is where a more structured and nuanced approach is required. Beyond the immediate demands of value delivery, there is a pressing need to focus on continuously developing team members’ specialized skills and competence. Testers, developers, designers, and other specialists must have dedicated avenues for growth to maintain their edge and drive innovation. This article explores how integrating Centers of Excellence (CoEs) into a scaled agile organization can create a structured yet dynamic environment for advanced skill development, ultimately enhancing individual capabilities and organizational competence. So let’s do it!

Cross-Functional Teams: The Foundation Of Agile Success

The cross-functional team model is paramount in any agile organization. These teams have all the necessary competencies to deliver value according to their mission, ensuring they remain self-sufficient and agile, regardless of their framework. However, while cross-functional teams excel in delivering value, frameworks often omit the crucial aspects of individual competence development and career planning.

This is where the line organization often plays a vital role. Collaborating with team coaches, Scrum Masters, and Product Owners, the line managers can ensure that team members receive the support needed to develop their skills and career paths. The line organization also plays a crucial in creating stability and safety for employees. Yet, there is also a need for specialized competence development. Testers, programmers, hardware engineers, and other specialists require a safe space to hone their expertise. Teams and Team of teams need a way for intentional competence development.

Communities Of Practice And Guilds: Informal Development Spaces

Frameworks like SAFe, LeSS, and the Spotify model address this need through Communities of Practice (CoPs) and Guilds. This is the third dimension of the organization, the first two being the cross-functional team organization and the line organization.

CoPs and Guilds are voluntary, informal groups where people with similar competencies can collaborate and grow their skills. Anyone can join a CoP or Guild. Guilds or CoPs can cross different Agile Release Trains (ARTs) or Tribes and even Large Solutions and Portfolios.

Examples of standard CoPs mentioned in the SAFe framework include CopS for Release Train Engineers (RTE), Scrum Masters/Team Coaches, Product Owners, and Developers. But we can, of course, start a CoP around any competence or role. These CoPs help break down silos, promote knowledge sharing, and drive cross-functional collaboration across the organization on a individual, volonteer basis.

The key characteristics of these informal groups include:

• Simplicity and Informality: Keeping structures simple and interactions informal to encourage participation.
• Trust Building: Fostering an environment of trust where individuals feel safe sharing and learning.
• Rapid Communication: Ensuring a swift flow of information and shared awareness.
• Knowledge Sharing: Increasing the collective knowledge base within the community.

While CoPs and guilds provide an excellent platform for informal, and sometimes formal, skill and competence development, more structured, intentional, and formal support is often needed to advance competencies to the next level. This is where Centers of Excellence (CoEs) come into play

Centers Of Excellence as A Breeding Ground for Innovation and Competence Development

A Center of Excellence can be pivotal within a scaled agile organization, providing a formal structure for advanced competence development. The concept is to establish CoEs that provide structured, ongoing support and innovation, transforming informal learning environments into formal pathways for skill advancement, continuous improvement, and fostering a pervasive learning culture. The CoE is not just there to build competence for indviduals, but build competence and capabilities for complete teams and teams of teams.

A CoE is formed by identifying people with the skills, knowledge, and ability to coach, train, and mentor others and who have an inner drive to continue learning. The CoE is typically a small, self-organized, self-managed, agile team that sometimes extends itself with skills and resources from the connected CoP or CoPs. People in the CoE are there full-time, are motivated by helping others, and use agile practices.

Examples of CoE areas

CoEs could extend this model to cover other critical areas of the organization, including but not limited to:

• Testing CoE: Focused on implementing and scaling automated testing practices.
• DevOps CoE: Driving DevOps practices and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.
• User Experience CoE: Enhancing UX practices across products and teams.
• Data Science CoE: Advancing analytics and data-driven decision-making.
• AI CoE: Advancing AI tools and practices for the organization.

In these different competence areas, CoEs are responsible for training, coaching, fostering innovation, and intentional continuous evolution within their respective domains. They support, coach, and mentor the various agile teams as needed.

Lean-Agile Center of Excellence

The Lean-Agile Center of Excellence (LACE) is a pivotal component of SAFe. It is a small, dedicated agile team that drives the transformation toward SAFe and fosters a Lean-Agile mindset within the organization.

Responsibilities and Functions

The LACE is responsible for:

• Transformation Backlog Management: LACE manages a transformation backlog that prioritizes strategic initiatives, ensuring that all efforts are aligned with the organization’s long-term goals and agile transformation objectives.
• Training and Coaching: LACE trains Lean-Agile change agents, including SAFe Program Consultants (SPCs), and conducts workshops for executives, managers, and other leaders. They provide continuous coaching and mentoring to Agile Release Trains (ARTs) and teams, ensuring consistent application of SAFe principles.
• Strategic Alignment and Communication: LACE ensures that transformation efforts align with the organization's strategic goals and communicates the vision and progress of the transformation across the organization through various channels.
• Creating a Learning Culture: LACE manages centralized funding for continuous learning and development, creates learning plans (in respect to agility), facilitates agile training, and measures the impact of these initiatives to ensure continuous improvement.
• Facilitation of Key Events: LACE coaches and can support facilitating critical events such as Program Increment (PI) planning, Inspect and Adapt workshops, and Value Stream Identification workshops to maintain alignment and foster a culture of continuous improvement.

Organizational Structure

A typical LACE team includes a Product Owner, a Scrum Master, and cross-functional members from various parts of the organization, bringing diverse skills and perspectives.

The LACE collaborates with the Value Management Office (VMO) and other CoEs (Centers of Excellence) to ensure a cohesive approach to transformation and continuous improvement.

Creating the Combined Center of Excellence

In a scaled agile setup, CoEs operate together with the Lean-Agile Center of Excellence (LACE), forming a unified force for transformation. Together with the LACE, the different CoEs form a strong, leading coalition for transformation and relentless, intentional, improvement, striving to build a learning organization.

One approach is to integrate the LACE and the other CoEs as a Team of Teams or an Agile Release Train (ART), similar to how the rest of the organization produces value. This setup, from here on referred to as the Combined Center of Excellence (CCE), serves as a transformative hub for the organization.

CCE Vision and Backlog

Imagine the CCE as a "Transformation Train" — a dedicated ART or Tribe encompassing the different areas of excellence. This Transformation Train, the CCE, should have a shared vision, mission, roadmap, and backlog, all aligned with the company's future aspirations. By incorporating agile and specialized technical competencies, this approach enhances the organization's agility and ensures that expertise in critical areas is continually developed and leveraged. The CCE operates with a unified vision and a single, common backlog, ensuring cohesive collaboration and alignment across various initiatives.

The CCE does not remove the transformation responsibility from other parts of the organization. The CCE is there to enable and support the rest of the organization, not to replace it or take charge of its responsibilities. Therefore, the CCE should strive not to be needed. The key here is to form enabling teams or individuals that enables the other part of organization with new competencies and wisdom.

Steps to Create and Integrate CoEs

This is similar to starting any new agile organization, but to point out and clarify the key activities:

1. Define the Mission and Vision:

   • Establish a clear, united mission statement and vision for the CCE, incorporating all its parts.
   • Ensure alignment with the company's strategic objectives and transformation vision.

2. Form CoE Teams:

   • Identify individuals with the necessary skills, knowledge, and ability to coach, train, and mentor.
   • Assemble small, self-organized, and self-managed agile teams dedicated to specific domains such as Testing, DevOps, UX, Data Science, and AI, depending on the improvements you want to achieve in the organization.
   • You can see this is the guiding coalition for future change initiatives that will be implemented.

3. Integrate with LACE:

   • See the LACE or whatever you call the agile center of excellence as one part of the CoE.
   • Ensure that CoE and LACE work together towards continuous improvement and building a learning organization.

4. Create a Unified Backlog:

   • Develop a single, common backlog that includes all change and improvement initiatives.
   • Categorize backlog items as change epics, features, and stories or in the same matter as you do in other parts of the organization.
   • Ensure the backlog aligns with the organization's strategic priorities.

5. Make experiments:

   • Embracing an empirical and experimental approach to change is crucial for success.
   • All changes are hypotheses. Find a way to measure outcomes as well as leading indicators for the change you have at hand. We must measure the outcomes of the change to know that we are doing the right thing.

6. Conduct ART Events:

   • Follow the same operational framework as other ARTs within the organization.
   • Conduct Program Increment (PI) planning sessions to prioritize and plan work.
   • Include all ART ceremonies such as planning events, daily stand-ups, demos, and retrospectives to ensure continuous feedback and iteration, driving consistent improvement and adaptation.

7. Prioritize and Sequence Initiatives:

   • Use the unified backlog to prioritize initiatives based on strategic goals.
   • Sequence work to ensure cohesive progress across the organization.
   • Have a roadmap as a forecast for visibility into longer timeframes.

8. Promote Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing:

   • Foster a collaborative environment where CoEs support, mentor, and enable various agile teams.
   • Encourage cross-functional and cross-team communication to share best practices and innovations.

9. Celebrate success:

   • Demo often, show and celebrate success stories, share the learnings

10. Remember the culture:

    • Constantly remind each other that the lasting changes are the changes in the culture, not merely from adopting new tools, methods, or processes.
    • Do not implement. Transform.

Effects

This unified and structured approach to CoEs offers several advantages:

• Strategic Alignment: Ensures all improvement initiatives are directly linked to the company's strategic objectives, providing clarity and direction.
• Matching demand with capacity: Aligns the organization's transformation demand with the capacity for change
• Enhanced Collaboration: Fosters collaboration across different CoEs, breaking down silos and encouraging the sharing of knowledge and best practices.
• Increased Organizational Competence: Enables intentional organizational competence development.
• Increased Agility: By operating in an agile manner, CoEs can quickly adapt to changing needs and priorities, maintaining a high level of responsiveness.
• Comprehensive Development: Supports agile practices and specialized skill development, ensuring a balanced growth environment for all team members.
• The CCE as Role Model: Establishes a benchmark for other organizational units and teams to follow, demonstrating the effectiveness of integrated and agile-driven approaches.

The approach advocated for in this article integrates CoEs into the agile framework and empowers them to drive continuous improvement and innovation. This cohesive strategy aligns with the company's vision, ensuring that all efforts contribute to a common goal of excellence and adaptability in a rapidly changing business landscape.

Conclusion

Integrating various Centers of Excellence within a scaled agile organization is not just an option — it's necessary in today's fast-paced, ever-evolving business environment. This strategic approach fosters an ecosystem where specialized skills are not only developed but are continuously pushed to the forefront of innovation and excellence. By aligning CoEs with the organization's overarching goals and leveraging agile principles, you enhance competencies and revolutionize your organization's capability to adapt, innovate, and deliver unparalleled value. You create a Learning Organization.

The challenge for leaders is clear: Do not settle for mediocrity. Embrace the full potential of your organization's talent. Cultivate a culture of continuous learning and collaboration; build a learning organization. The future belongs to those who dare to push the boundaries and relentlessly pursue excellence. Are you ready to transform your organization and lead it to new heights? The time for complacency is over—step up, integrate, and elevate your organization through the power of Agile Centers of Excellence.

Last updated Sep 18, 2024