Agile Center of Excellence
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An Agile Center of Excellence (ACoE) is a team or group within an organization that is dedicated to promoting and supporting agile practices. They are typically responsible for educating and training employees on agile methodologies, facilitating the adoption of agile practices, and ensuring that agile principles are being applied consistently throughout the organization.
Centers of Excellence (CoEs)
A Center of Excellence (CoE), and sometimes called a Center for Excellence (C4E), is a group of people with specialized skills and expertise whose job is to provide leadership and purposely disseminate that knowledge within your organization. CoEs should not be confused with Communities of Practice (CoPs), discussed later, are sometimes referred to as guilds. In the last few years we’ve seen Agile CoEs, Testing CoEs, DevOps CoEs, and Architecture CoEs created within organizations to help their continuous improvement efforts.
Why CoEs?
Forming a CoE
CoEs and Other Team
Why CoEs?
A Center of Excellence (CoE) is typically formed to address a skills/knowledge deficit within an organization. The members of a CoE are typically coaches, so an Agile CoE is a collection of agile coaches, a testing CoE a collection of testing coaches, and so on. CoE coaches will be involved with many of the activities of Continuous Improvement:
Identifying techniques
Coaches will work with one another, and with the people that they are coaching, to identify potential techniques (practices, strategies, principles) that they can help people to adopt to improve the way that they work.
Sharing techniques
Coaches will help practitioners to share techniques that they find effective with one another. Helping to build a learning organization is the primary way for CoE coaches to scale their efforts and better yet work their way out of job.
Capturing techniques
CoE coaches will work with practitioners to capture viable techniques so as to build organizational memory around their processes and strategies.
Supporting teams
The primary mission for CoE coaches is to support individual and team learning. As you can see in the goal diagram below, there is a wide range of strategies available to you.
Organizing CoPs
Very often a CoE will initiate, or at least support the initiation of, one or more communities of practice (CoP) to aid their educational efforts. For example, an Agile CoE may help to organize an Agile CoP, an Agile Testing CoP, a Lean Architecture CoP, and many others.
Governing improvement
A CoE will often collect and track a collection of metrics to help them both govern and to justify your organization’s investment in the CoE.