Building a Center of Excellence: Your Guide to Scaling Knowledge Without Building Bureaucracy

“We’re starting a Center of Excellence!”

If those words made you cringe a little, I get it. The term has been weaponized by organizations that wanted to sound fancy while creating yet another approval bottleneck. But here’s the thing: a well-designed Center of Excellence (COE) is genuinely one of the best investments you can make in scaling knowledge, driving adoption, and building a culture of continuous improvement.

Let’s talk about what a COE actually is, why you might need one, and how to build one that helps rather than hinders.

What Is a Center of Excellence?

A Center of Excellence is a cross-functional team or community responsible for establishing best practices, providing guidance, and driving adoption of a specific technology, practice, or capability across an organization.

Think of it as a distributed expertise network rather than a centralized control tower.

The key word is excellence, not authority. A COE’s job is to make everyone better at something, not to be the only ones allowed to do it.

Other Names You Might Hear

Organizations love renaming things to avoid baggage (or to feel unique), so you might encounter:

• Community of Practice (CoP) - More informal, focused on knowledge sharing
• Enablement Team - Emphasis on helping others succeed
• Platform Team - When coupled with building internal tools/platforms
• Guild - Popularized by Spotify’s engineering culture
• Tiger Team - Usually short-term and focused on a specific initiative
• Champions Program - Often the precursor or parallel structure to a COE

The names differ, but the core mission is the same: spread expertise, establish standards, and accelerate adoption.

Why Do We Need Them?

Let’s say your organization just adopted GitHub Copilot, or Kubernetes, or a new security framework. You’ve got:

• A few experts who really understand how to use it well
• A bunch of teams who are trying to figure it out on their own
• Inconsistent practices emerging across the org
• Repeated mistakes because lessons learned aren’t being shared
• Frustrated developers asking the same questions in different Slack channels

Sound familiar?

A COE solves this by creating a structured way to:

1. Capture and codify best practices so teams don’t reinvent the wheel
2. Provide consistent guidance so everyone benefits from collective knowledge
3. Create feedback loops so the org continuously improves
4. Reduce time-to-value for new tools and practices
5. Build internal expertise instead of relying on expensive consultants forever

Without a COE, knowledge stays siloed, adoption is inconsistent, and you end up with 15 different ways to do the same thing, none of them great.

What Does a COE Actually Do?

A healthy COE typically handles some combination of these responsibilities:

Guidance and Standards

• Create reference architectures and templates
• Publish best practice documentation
• Define (not dictate) recommended patterns
• Maintain example repositories and starter kits

Enablement and Training

• Run workshops, office hours, and lunch-and-learns
• Create onboarding materials for new team members
• Develop self-service learning paths
• Pair with teams to help them implement solutions

Community Building

• Facilitate knowledge sharing across teams
• Host regular meetups or demo sessions
• Maintain communication channels (Slack, Teams, etc.)
• Celebrate wins and share success stories

Consultation and Support

• Provide architecture reviews (advisory, not approval gates!)
• Help troubleshoot complex problems
• Connect teams facing similar challenges
• Escalate common pain points to leadership

Continuous Improvement

• Gather feedback on tools, processes, and practices
• Identify patterns and anti-patterns across the org
• Advocate for improvements to leadership
• Measure and report on adoption and outcomes

COE vs. Champions Program: What’s the Difference?

Short answer? They’re siblings, not strangers.

A Champions Program is typically a network of enthusiastic volunteers embedded in teams who advocate for a tool or practice. Champions are your “boots on the ground” who:

• Answer questions in their team’s context
• Share updates and new features
• Provide feedback from the front lines
• Model good practices for their peers

A Center of Excellence is more structured, often with dedicated staff or significant time allocation, focused on creating assets, running programs, and driving org-wide initiatives.

Here’s how they work together:

The magic happens when you have both: a COE creating the playbooks and a Champions network distributing them.

Many organizations start with a Champions Program and evolve it into a COE as the initiative matures. Others launch a COE and then recruit Champions to extend their reach. Either path works; just know they complement each other beautifully.

Steps to Start a Center of Excellence

Ready to build one? Here’s a practical roadmap:

1. Define the Scope and Mission

Be specific about what your COE covers. “DevOps COE” is too broad. “GitHub Platform COE” or “Cloud Infrastructure COE” gives focus.

Write a mission statement that answers:

• What capability or technology does this COE focus on?
• Who do we serve?
• What outcomes are we driving toward?

2. Get Executive Sponsorship

A COE without leadership support is a hobby project. You need:

• A sponsor who can allocate time and resources
• Air cover when priorities compete
• Someone who can connect your work to business outcomes

3. Identify Your Founding Members

Start small. You need:

• 2-4 people with genuine expertise
• Representation from different teams or business units
• A mix of technical depth and communication skills

Avoid the trap of making this a “side of desk” effort with no real time allocation. People need dedicated capacity to make meaningful contributions.

4. Assess the Current State

Before you start prescribing solutions, understand:

• What practices currently exist across teams?
• Where are the biggest pain points?
• What’s already working well?
• What questions keep coming up?

Talk to people. Run surveys. Look at support tickets. The goal is to meet teams where they are.

5. Pick Your First Wins

Don’t try to boil the ocean. Identify 2-3 high-impact, achievable initiatives:

• A quick-start guide for the most common use case
• A template repository teams can clone
• An office hours slot for Q&A

Early wins build credibility and momentum.

6. Create Feedback Loops

A COE that operates in a vacuum becomes irrelevant. Build in mechanisms for continuous input:

• Regular syncs with Champions or team leads
• Feedback channels (Slack, surveys, GitHub issues)
• Retrospectives on your own processes

7. Communicate, Communicate, Communicate

Nobody benefits from a COE they don’t know exists. Establish your presence:

• Announce your mission and how to engage
• Share wins and learnings regularly
• Make it easy to find your resources

Steps to Grow a Center of Excellence

Once you’ve got traction, here’s how to scale:

Recruit Champions

Expand your reach by building a network of advocates embedded in teams. Give them:

• Regular updates and early access to new guidance
• A community to connect with peers
• Recognition for their contributions

Measure Outcomes, Not Just Activities

Move beyond “we held 10 office hours” to “teams using our templates deploy 40% faster.” Connect your work to business outcomes.

Productize Your Offerings

Treat your guidance like a product:

• Version your documentation
• Create self-service resources
• Build feedback into your release process

Expand Thoughtfully

Add scope only when you’ve proven value in your current domain. Growth should be pulled by demand, not pushed by ambition.

Rotate Membership

Avoid a static crew that loses touch with the field. Rotate members in and out to:

• Keep perspectives fresh
• Spread expertise back to teams
• Prevent burnout

What NOT to Do

Let’s talk about the anti-patterns that give COEs a bad name:

Don’t Make the COE Gatekeepers

The fastest way to kill your COE’s value is to turn it into an approval checkpoint. If teams need COE sign-off to deploy, you’ve created a bottleneck, not an enablement function.

Instead: Provide guidance and recommendations. Make your standards easy to adopt. Trust teams to make good decisions and be there when they need help.

Don’t Put Them on a Pedestal

A COE that positions itself as the “experts who know better” breeds resentment. Nobody likes being talked down to.

Instead: Stay humble. Remember that teams have context you don’t. Position yourself as a resource, not an authority. The best COE members are teachers, not gatekeepers.

Don’t Ignore Feedback

If teams tell you your templates don’t work for their use case, listen. A COE that dismisses feedback becomes irrelevant fast.

Don’t Operate in Isolation

Stay connected to the teams you serve. If your COE is huddled in a corner creating “best practices” without talking to practitioners, you’re building ivory tower documentation.

Don’t Forget to Celebrate

Share success stories. Recognize teams that adopt good practices. Make it visible when your work leads to real outcomes. This builds momentum and encourages adoption.

TL;DR

What is a COE? A cross-functional team focused on scaling expertise and driving adoption of a specific capability.

Why do we need them? To avoid reinventing the wheel, share best practices, and accelerate adoption across the org.

How do they relate to Champions? Champions are your grassroots advocates; COEs are your strategic enablement team. They work best together.

How do you start one?

1. Define a focused scope and mission
2. Get executive sponsorship
3. Start small with dedicated members
4. Assess current state before prescribing
5. Pick quick wins to build credibility
6. Create feedback loops
7. Communicate constantly

How do you grow one?

• Recruit a Champions network
• Measure outcomes, not activities
• Productize your guidance
• Expand only when pulled by demand

What should you avoid?

• Becoming gatekeepers
• Acting like the smartest people in the room
• Ignoring feedback from teams
• Operating in isolation

Build a COE that enables, empowers, and elevates. Your future self (and your org) will thank you.

Got questions about building a COE or Champions program? I’d love to hear about your experiences. Find me on LinkedIn, GitHub, or Bluesky.