Building the Right COE for You!

In the Certified Intelligent Automation Professional certification, I was introduced to the concept of creating a center of excellence to serve as the backbone behind a process automation project. The idea of the center of excellence is that it serves as the overall process management system. While the design of the center of excellence can vary from organization to organization, the purpose is always the same. Guide an automation project from its conception and support it as the new process becomes business as usual. The COE should always be specifically designed to meet the requirements of an organization, they cannot be cookie-cutter. A COE framework that is successful in one organization will not necessarily be successful again even if it is implemented following the same standards. These functions need to be designed based on the actual day-to-day operations of your organization. In some cases, a formal COE does not need to be created if the duties and responsibilities have been addressed and are being attended to by relevant stakeholders. An automation project can only be successful if it has the proper foundation to support it.

Building a COE starts during the initialization phase of the automation process. This process must start at the same time as the journey begins so that it can grow and mature alongside the actual processes that are taking place. The most important thing to understand about building a COE is that it will take many iterations for it to be perfect. The realities of how things are done vs how they were pictured conceptually usually have drastic differences. Meaning that the team needs to be revising processes to make sure they fit into how the organization truly operates. The bulk of the COE design is during the industrialization phase of the automation process. Here, the COE will evolve to effectively work through 5 key tasks starting with creating strategic objectives. The COE (or the assigned stakeholders in an informal COE) needs to be the one driving automation initiatives. It is also then responsible for coming up with the methodologies to make it happen. The COE will figure out what skills, tools, and processes need to be brought in to make the project a success. After figuring out the what and the how it is now the responsibility of the COE to consider what governance structure needs to be set in place. Having set roles and responsibilities will ensure that there is no lag in the process and will create an appropriate channel to turn to if there is ever an issue with the automation. Having an appropriate governance structure allows the COE to then transition to being able to support the automation project which is crucial to its success. The COE is responsible for dealing with the ongoing iterations of the automation process. Lastly, a successful COE can work with the information technology team to meet the specific requirements of their environment. An automation project can be very valuable, but it will not yield a positive result if all the company data is compromised in the process. The 5 responsibilities outlined above need to be fulfilled within any organization that you look at if they want to have a successful automation project. However, how they get there, in terms of COE design and its formality is entirely organization-dependent. For example, SIG, the organization that I work at is very small. We would most likely assign roles to key stakeholders but need the entire team to be working together to make sure this is successful. We are a good example of a centralized COE framework.

An automation project is like a child. There are many different “parenting” techniques, but it all boils down to one thing if you do not give the child the proper support and guidance while it is in its infancy then it will not have the necessary skills and tools to be successful in real-world situations. It is the same for an automation project. These projects are all about the backbone that supports them, if the processes to keep automation in check are weak then the project will either fail or not create value like it was designed (and invested lots of money) for it to do. If I could only have one takeaway from the entire certification it would be that you are only as strong as your weakest process and if you do not have a contingency plan in place for when something goes wrong, you better get to work.?

#automation #centerofexcellence #digitaltransformation