Decentralised Excellence Over Centre of Excellence

On the same topic see also these posts: - The LASE - Why an Agile Center of Excellence is a Really Bad Idea - The agile CoE is about to die

Thanks to the authors: Ove Holmberg; Anthony Mersino and Thomas Cagley; Sriram Narayan.

# Centre of excellence A Centre of Excellence provides **traditional** leadership, **best practices**, research, support and/or training for a focus area. It defines a **separation** between those in the centre defining the best practices and those on the periphery adopting the practices. It may be accompanied by an **interpretation of excellence that is elitist**. The best practices are often rolled out in a **top-down** fashion or with a top-down drive

# Decentralised or Distributed excellence, from good Agile

In good Agile, there are **good practices in context** instead of best practices. In good Agile, delivering and pursuing excellence are two **intertwined activities** that support each other. Delivering provides context and feedback that support the pursuit of Excellence, while Excellence benefits the ability to deliver. They naturally go hand in hand. Everyone, starting from those doing the work, experiment, learn, adapt and innovate. **Excellence is collaborative** community-driven knowledge-creation among peers. We learn in public and from each other. Excellence is defined and demonstrated by pursuing and achieving it.

# CoE in name, that really are something else

Thanks to Chris Combe for the insights. Some organisations adopt the name CoE for something different than a CoE. They are local **decentralised** groups. They give **a home** to roles not yet full-time embedded in a team. The members of such groups **provide services and expertise in the form of knowledge sharing or mentoring** to the teams that pull them. For its members, such local groups provide **some line-management admin** whose responsibilities have not yet been delegated to a Community of Practice or a team: personal development, career progression, etc. As such these local groups are not an Agile anti-pattern like a CoE. They may want to use a different name to avoid confusion, for example, something like Enabling teams or Service teams. And in an Agile org these groups should also strive to become self-managing, delegate knowledge-creation and knowledge-sharing responsibilities to a local CoP, and shift the focus on mentoring to enable teams' autonomy mentoring and limit the service provided to advising for the more complex initiatives and for untangling the most complex problems.