Agile Center of Excellence
Discover how we drive global innovation through agile practices that transform organizations.
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 have seen Agile CoEs, Testing CoEs, DevOps CoEs, and Architecture CoEs created within organizations to help their continuous improvement efforts.
Why CoEs?
Forming a CoE
Building the foundation with the right people, structure, and objectives to drive agile transformation across teams.
CoEs and Other Teams
How CoEs collaborate with development teams, product owners, and leadership to align agile practices across the organization.
Why CoEs?
A Center of Excellence (CoE) is typically formed to establish a skills/knowledge center within an organization. The members of a CoE are typically coaches, so an Agile CoE is a collection of agile coaches, a testing CoE is 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 can help people to adopt or improve the way that they work.
Sharing techniques
Coaches will bring practitioners to share techniques that they find effective with one another. Finding to build a learning organization is the primary way for CoE coaches to scale their effort, and better yet work their way out of a 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 individuals and team learnings. As you can see in the goals 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 lead their external efforts. For example, an Agile CoE may help to create 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 guide your organization's investment in the CoE.
Ready to Build Your Agile CoE?
Transform your organization with a structured, scalable approach to agile excellence.