A Coalition of the Motivated
Here at Idea Harbor we have seen many organizations look to solve internal challenges either through tooling or through control, such as implementing a Center of Excellence. A Center of Excellence (COE or CoE), in this context, is a team, a shared facility, or an entity that defines policy, provides leadership, sets best practices, and creates enforcement mechanisms (like review boards) for a specific focus area.
Prescriptive Nature
The challenge with CoEs is that they are designed to enforce standards and consistency. While this may be beneficial in the short term, it leads to a rigid and gated impediment to progress. Over time, CoEs become more about adherence to procedures than about solving real business value problems for the customer. This rigidity stifles the very innovation and adaptability needed in today’s fast-paced business environment.
Customer Obsession is Lacking
A fundamental flaw in many CoEs is their lack of true customer obsession. CoEs often try to cover too broad or too narrow a scope, losing touch with the specific needs and pain points of their consumers. As a result, they struggle to deliver tangible value and become another bureaucratic layer that teams must navigate.
How do we address this challenge?
The Power of Communities of Collaboration
At Idea Harbor, we’ve successfully driven change through Communities of Collaboration.
A Community must be:
Driven by the people that are affected, the actual consumers, the ones most motivated to drive change (coalition of the motivated)
Created out of a problem statement that has a defined outcome
Temporary, exists for as long as it’s needed
Guided by tenets that drive the implementation of solutions decided on by all parties involved
Sponsored by an executive who will clear barriers for the community
Led by a rotating group of facilitators
Empowered to rethink processes and implementations
Focused on a particular business problem
Comprised of people from all affected and relevant disciplines
Driven by the people who are affected
Change does not happen unless there’s buy-in from the consumer. Compare this to a product in a store. If people don’t like the product or don’t see a use for it, it will stay on the shelves. If it solves a need, it will sell itself almost. Those products get created through many loops of customer feedback. That feedback comes from people who are actively trying to help. Their motivation can come from many angles but is usually driven by a need to change a current state or process.
Let’s use feedback data for a product as an example to illustrate the issue. A product team needs to get insights into the usage of their product in order to improve it, but security is making it hard to access the data, and when the team can access the data, the data quality doesn’t address their needs due to inconsistent formatting or data being duplicated or missing. It’s only the product team that truly feels the pain and frustration, and they are the ones that can produce the most value out of accurate data. Only they will be motivated to change the process and implementation, and only they can validate if the problem is solved.
A problem statement and a defined outcome
It’s often said that you should not solve problems that don’t exist yet. In this case, we would emphasize that one should recognize problems and do something about them. Working backward from the consumer is the only way to successfully solve business problems quickly, effectively, and accurately. If the consumer does not agree that you’ve solved their problem, you most likely have not. Clearly define the outcome with the consumer and agree that it would solve their problem. Involve all the parties that influence this problem and don’t compromise on the outcome. The common pitfall for organizations is for CoEs trying to keep control and lose the customer obsession mindset. The result is an organization that can no longer innovate and compete because of painful processes that are slow to evolve, a culture of stagnancy, and an exit for motivated people. When you succeed in a Community, you will expose your true problems, drive change effectively, and see an increase in drive and momentum across the board. This will result in better business results, increased retention, and an increase in innovation
Returning to our product team, we can say that the problem is a lack of access to accurate data. But depending on who you ask, they will say that the data is accurate and available. If we work backward from the customer/consumer, we can define an outcome that will support the problem statement and provide clarity for everyone involved. A defined outcome could look like this:
Data needs to be
Available through self-service so that detailed reports are always up to date
Consistent in format
De-duplicated and accurate
Easily digested
Some of these outcomes will be shared amongst multiple problems, so it’s important to share them between communities of the same nature.
Tenets that bound the solution
The community must have tenets in order for the implementation to be successful for all parties involved. This will keep considered focus on the fundamentals that need to be included in a solution. The intent here is that the solution needs to keep all these tenets in mind. Some can be contradictory, so it’s important to find a balance between all tenets. There needs to be an agreement between all parties to find that balance.
The community to solve our product team’s issue can have the following tenets
Follow the principle of least privilege
Self-service for the end user
Simplicity is key
Provide correct and consistent data
Executive Sponsor
For the Community to have advocacy within the organization, there needs to be a concerned and involved executive leader who can act as its sponsor. This leader should be affected by the consumer's pain, and be motivated to advocate for the effort to succeed. This can consist of bringing other leaders in to help resolve disputes, to help drive change across departments, or to help find the funding required to solve the problem. This person should again prioritize customer obsession and effectively advocate for the Community and the customer.
The executive sponsor can be the VP of Product who collaborates closely with the VP of Data or any VP of the department owning the other side of the fence.
Facilitation Rotation
Long-running Communities run the risk of becoming stagnant. Often, people leading the Community get burned out, in a rut, or become demotivated. Rotating the leadership and facilitation of the Community every so often keeps the energy levels high and makes sure the Community is still focused on solving real business problems. Determine a cadence that works for the leader and the Community.
In our example, the standard rotation has been decided for six months, but initially, there will be 2 to 3 leaders coordinating, given that the largest part of the workload is defining the right solutions and coordinating between many departments.
Is Empowered
Empowerment next to customer obsession, and a lack of progress, are the most frequent reasons why a Community will succeed or fail. The Community must be empowered to think creatively, drive change, and achieve tangible outcomes. Without empowering the Community to make change happen, it will compound frustration and lead to wasted time and effort. The executive sponsor and your company culture play a huge role towards rebuilding trust and fostering collaboration.
In our example, the current data management process isn’t working. The data is streamed into an account that the product team doesn’t have access to, and the team streaming the data into that account doesn’t understand what good data would look like. The community decides to build a data pipeline using an ETL process to load the data into a data lake where a data catalog will make it available to data consumers. They start experimenting with an implementation in a working group, eventually come to a consistent mechanism. They are able to deploy this quickly due to the collaboration between security, infrastructure, data, and product teams, all keeping the outcome in mind and being customer-obsessed. Joining these teams in a Community focused on the same outcome builds an understanding of the business value, and creates an active voice in achieving that outcome, builds trust across the different stakeholders in the Community. An understanding of each stakeholder’s requirement is reached through open communication and collaboration, and trust is built through mutual understanding.
Cross Discipline
If the particular business issue was easy to solve, then the customer could just make the necessary changes on their own. However, in many cases (such as our example), the solution requires thoughtful contributions from many of the organization's disciplines (HR, Security, Engineering, Compliance, …). By creating a Community around a particular business issue, we allow the organization to create unique and innovative solutions to those issues. By including the concerned and impacted parts of the business, concerns around security, compliance, maintenance, and operations can be addressed while still solving the fundamental objective of increased business value.
