Why do I need a ShareDo Centre of Excellence?

Establishing a Centre of Excellence (CoE) for ShareDo is instrumental in achieving exceptional project outcomes and driving excellence within your organisation. By consolidating expertise and best practices in ShareDo implementation, the CoE ensures consistent, high-quality delivery that aligns with your organisation's guidelines and strategies. It serves as a knowledge hub, leveraging insights from past projects to refine methodologies and enhance efficiency. Your CoE should also foster a culture of continuous improvement, staying at the forefront of industry advancements and optimising ShareDo's potential. Through robust governance and oversight, the CoE not only bolsters the success of your project's success but also instils confidence in stakeholders, ultimately positioning the organisation for sustained growth and innovation in ShareDo initiatives.

Centralised Expertise: The CoE brings together a team of experts with in-depth knowledge of ShareDo. This expertise helps make informed decisions, resolve complex issues, and optimise the application for maximum business value.

Governance and Oversight: The CoE provides governance by defining and enforcing best practices, standards, and policies for ShareDo projects. This ensures consistency, compliance, and adherence to organisational goals.

Organisational Best Practice and Efficiency: The CoE provides a holistic viewpoint on processes that are centralised or re-used across the organisation. The CoE can bring together requirements and needs from across the organisation and ensure that any projects take a holistic rather than siloed view. 

Efficient Resource Allocation: By centralising expertise, the organisation can allocate resources more efficiently. The CoE can prioritise projects based on business value, dependencies, and strategic objectives.

Reduced Operational Overheads: The CoE streamlines processes and provides standardised templates, which reduces unnecessary operational overheads. This leads to cost savings and more efficient use of resources.

Quality Assurance: The CoE sets and maintains high standards for project delivery. It conducts regular health checks and ensures that projects meet defined quality benchmarks.

Knowledge Sharing and Training: The CoE serves as a knowledge hub, providing training and educational resources for project teams and end users. This ensures that everyone involved has the necessary skills and knowledge.

Adaptation to Changing Needs: The CoE stays updated with new material and guidance from ShareDo, allowing the organisation to adapt to evolving requirements and take advantage of new features or capabilities.

Risk Mitigation: The CoE can identify and address potential risks and issues early in the project lifecycle, minimising the impact on timelines and outcomes.

Cross-Functional Collaboration: In a multi-business area and multi-geography setting, the CoE facilitates collaboration and knowledge sharing across different teams and regions, promoting a cohesive approach to ShareDo implementation.

Continuous Improvement: The CoE is committed to continuous improvement, refining its services based on lessons learned and evolving best practices. This ensures that the organisation is always striving for better outcomes.

 A CoE plays a pivotal role in ensuring that ShareDo is implemented effectively and delivers maximum value to your organisation. It acts as a centralised hub for expertise, governance and best practices, ultimately contributing to the success of ShareDo projects across your landscape.

How to implement a successful CoE

In the dynamic landscape of modern organisations, establishing a CoE for ShareDo signifies a commitment to excellence, efficiency, and consistency in project delivery. This specialised unit is entrusted with the responsibility of ensuring that projects align with organisational guidelines, leverage past experiences, and consistently meet or exceed stakeholder expectations. Effective governance and oversight are fundamental pillars that underpin the success of a ShareDo CoE, and to make a CoE successful, it needs to operate within the following parameters.

1. Clear Charter and Mandate
   A CoE for ShareDo must have a well-defined charter and mandate. This document outlines the purpose, objectives, scope, and responsibilities of the CoE. It serves as a guiding beacon, helping establish boundaries and expectations for all stakeholders. By clearly defining its role, the CoE ensures that projects adhere to organisational goals and standards.
2. Robust Governance Framework
   A robust governance framework provides the structure and processes necessary for effective decision-making and accountability. This includes defining roles and responsibilities, establishing communication channels, and setting up regular review and reporting mechanisms. The framework should be agile enough to adapt to changing circumstances while still maintaining a strong control environment.
3. Compliance with Organisational Guidelines
   Ensuring that projects adhere to organisational guidelines is paramount for the success of the CoE. This involves a review process at various stages of a project's lifecycle to confirm compliance with policies, standards, and best practices. Regular audits and assessments serve as checks and balances to guarantee adherence.
4. Leveraging Lessons from Previous Projects
   One of the key advantages of a CoE is its ability to learn from past experiences. Through the systematic review and analysis of previous projects, the CoE gains valuable insights into what worked well and where improvements can be made. These lessons learned, serve as a knowledge repository, allowing the CoE to refine methodologies and approaches for future endeavours.
5. Continuous Improvement Culture
   A culture of continuous improvement is indispensable for a ShareDo CoE. This involves a commitment to ongoing learning, adaptation to emerging functionality and business need, and a willingness to challenge existing norms. Regular retrospectives and post-project reviews provide opportunities for the CoE to identify areas for enhancement and innovation.
6. Performance Metrics and KPIs
   Establishing meaningful Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is essential for measuring the effectiveness and impact of the CoE. These metrics should align with organisational objectives and provide tangible evidence of the CoE's value to project delivery. Regular monitoring and reporting on KPIs ensure transparency and accountability.
7. Stakeholder Engagement and Communication
   Open and transparent communication with stakeholders is vital for building trust and ensuring alignment with organisational goals. The CoE should actively engage with project teams, senior leadership, and other relevant stakeholders to provide updates, seek input, and address concerns. Effective communication channels foster a collaborative environment.

Six First Steps

Setting up a CoE is likely to be an ongoing process which changes over time and may vary depending on the size of your organisation. Here are some first steps you may want to take to get your CoE up and running. 

1. Create a CoE Mandate - take some time to write down what the Centre of Excellence is for, what you are trying to achieve within your organisation and who will be involved. How are you going to measure the value provided? How will your CoE be structured - will there be full-time resources, or will they be shared across other work?
2. Organisational High-Level Design - We produce a high-level design for each ShareDo project. For any organisation where multiple ShareDo implementations are taking place, it is always good practice to produce an Organisational High-Level Design. This will include the definition of any processes that are shared across the organisation, e.g. matter opening, and common elements such as your approach for security and teams. Your ShareDo consultant will be able to provide you with a sample document.
3. Define your Naming Conventions - this may seem like a granular piece of information, but getting naming conventions and structure set up early on for your configuration items and documents means your system will be much easier to manage in the long term. The article in this link provides some sample Naming Conventions.
4. Project Request Process - Happily, after an initial ShareDo implementation, you will get interest generated across the business. Work out how you are going to consolidate, resource and prioritise these projects. Establishing a steering committee is a good idea to provide overall governance for ShareDo implementation across the organisation
5. Establish a programme steering board - the programme steering board should consist of a mixture of representatives from IT and the business, and should be responsible for overseeing the rollout of ShareDo across your organisation. 
   • Program oversight and prioritisation - ensuring that the ShareDo program of work is aligned with your organisation's strategic goals and objectives.
   • Decision making - the board is empowered to make any key decisions regarding the program, including prioritisation, budget allocation and resource planning.
   • Risk Management - ensure any risks / issues associated with the program of work are dealt with 
   • Stakeholder Engagement - facilitate the communication between different stakeholders involved in the program, including internal teams, external partners, clients and sponsors.
   • Compliance and Governance - ensures the program operates with your organisational and compliance frameworks.
6. Establish a Standard Delivery Process - Establishing a standard delivery approach for your ShareDo projects is key. Your ShareDo consultancy team will have provided a set of standard templates during your first implementation. Tailor these to the requirements of your organisation and build them into a standard repeatable process.