Recently (Southeast Dreamin’ & World Tour London) I spoke about moving from being a Solo Admin to creating a Center (or Centre) of Excellence (CoE). The talk I did at Southeast Dreamin’ was a little different content wise from what I had spoken about at World Tour. I’ve also summarized a fair amount of the important points in this post. Now that you have a good background on how to quantify and qualify your time as well as ask for assistance, I am going to move into the next part of this topic.
What is a Center of Excellence?
A Center of Excellence leverages People, Processes, Knowledge and Technology to drive business value, encourage collaboration, socialize best practices and promote standards across the business.
This sounds fairly easy and straightforward, right? Not really. The devil is always in the details and in trying to figure out how to effectively leverage people, processes, knowledge and technology to drive business value. It’s one of those sentences that sounds great on paper (or online) but means very little without some best practices to guide you through the creation process.
Core Pillars
Ok, well core pillars now sounds really official! It sounds like we’re getting somewhere now, so let’s define the 5 Core Pillars that comprise a CoE.
Governance: This is the processes that ensures the effective and efficient use of IT in enabling an organization to achieve its goals.
Business Management: Empowering the business to know what to deliver, why it is important and the value to the business.
Change Management: The process to manage enhancements, timely delivery to market, prioritization and utilization of resources
Release Management: Ensuring the highest quality with structured processes and methodology.
Support Management: The ability to provide Subject Matter Expertise, responsiveness and education.
Now that you know what the Core Pillars are, why do you want to build a CoE?
Here are some reasons why building a CoE is the right thing to do to manage Salesforce effectively for your business.
- Salesforce is unique and encompasses competing stakeholders within Sales, Marketing, Service across one or more businesses and/or regions
- Delivering a quicker time to market with utilizing out of the box and easily configured features but discipline and process is essential
- Managing the rapid change of pace as Salesforce has thrice annually releases in addition to ever changing business needs
- Justifying license model and reacting to data management challenges by ensuring adoption is high, data is clean and trusted by the business to justify investment
- Acting on complex org decisions such as single or multi org strategies due to organic growth or growth by acquisition in a firm.
In the next post, I will detail each of these pillars out more and with additional details.
Force of Anarchy 