I was at the World Congress for Business Analysts (WCBA) in Disneyland today, and heard Amy Nichols of Wachovia and Glenn Brûlé of ESI International talk about the best practices around building a BA Center of Excellence.
Amy laid out the business case for why Wachovia started their BA Center of Excellence 18 months ago. They had unpredictable project cycles, no concise way to measure ROI, customer satisfaction after project closeout was poor and they had waste with their SDLC. There was also confusion around what are requirements, why are they valuable and what makes a good requirement.
Glenn laid out a Capability to Maturity Model to follow when building a Center of Excellence.
He also mentioned that you have to work incrementally by starting out with a Community of Practice (COP), progressing to a BA Bureau and then to a Center of Excellence (COE). One way to think of the progression is as a bulls-eye with the Community of Practice as the outer ring and the Center of Excellence as the bulls-eye.
Where do you start? Glenn said the model is designed like a checklist - start with the first row for each column and work your way down the model to move from a Community of Practice to a Center of Excellence.
Why build a Center of Excellence? The benefits include:
- decreased risk on our projects
- increased value for our projects
- improved quality of our deliverables
- improved time to deliver our goods and services
Amy and Glenn closed with Five Factors for Success:
- have a plan (from concept to enterprise analysis)
- consider the framework
- obtain executive sponsor
- align corporate goals (what’s the value perception?)
- define roles and responsibilities (who’s going to maintain it?)
Glenn thought step 1 - have a plan - was the most critical while Amy added that having a passionate executive sponsor was also very important.