I hope you all had a good couple of days to contemplate the new organizational structure that was discussed in the town halls this week. I have received feedback from a number of you and there are a few areas where I wanted to provide additional clarification, today I’ll cover off on the Centers of Excellence (COE) concept. It’s important to remember that an org chart is a tool that we use in order to organize ourselves around our clients’ needs. It is the quality of the service to the client that is the guiding principle and goal to be achieved during this process. During the last week, there was a lot of discussion about the COE and how they fit into our model. When we think about the Digital Transformation business and the Project business, we need to have the ability to deliver a quality work product. So, we needed a concept that supports both types of engagements. Without sacrificing our expertise and ensuring that we have a method for capturing and perpetuating best practices throughout the company.
What the Center Of Excellence are NOT:
- A big resource pool
- A substitute for good consulting
- A series of organizational stove pipes
The primary focus of the COE is to ensure that we provide the highest quality of work to our clients in a standardized and efficient way. This will allow us to teach and train developers and ANY and EVERY level the patterns and best practices of technology. Much like a great restaurant, the food that is delivered (or the work that we provide our clients) needs to be of a consistently high quality that makes you want to come back for more. The COE is a structure that ensures that everyone knows what they need to do and when they need to do it, to be the basis for a successfully executed implementation. As an engineer, it is important that you have exposure to Best Practices and the ‘Tahzoo way’ of doing things so that you can learn new technologies and stay current in the marketplace. Because the vast majority of our implementations require integration with a variety of 3rd party systems it’s also important that we are consistent in the way that we write code and plan for inoperability. The COE model also provides additional career paths for individuals who aspire to take management and leadership roles within Tahzoo. Our engineering excellence and prowess should always be the strength of our company. There are a lot of companies with great ideas, but very few who can execute at scale and even fewer who can execute at scale and with the ambition that Tahzoo brings to our clients.
In the 21st century, the collage of marketing systems and applications needs to be rationalized and integrated in order for our clients to be able to deliver differentiated customer experience at scale. As we do more implementations, we need to perfect our craft in terms of the implementations but also the integrations, the best practices and lessons learned will be developed and curated in the context of the COE. As we add additional members to the team, they should benefit from the lessons learned from both successes and challenges on projects. As a technical consultant, you should feel confident that you won’t be left alone to figure it out, you will have a team of people who have the commitment and experience to help you be better at your craft.
The engagement models for the COE will change based on the type of project or the line of business supporting the customer. For example, in the Digital Transformation Business, you may be assigned to an account team for an extended amount of time, whereas in the ALM business you may be assigned to resolve or remediate an issue. Regardless of which model is used for the engagement, the principles still apply which is that we need engineering excellent and the COE is the primary construct to ensure that the quality of our work is the core experience of working with Tahzoo.
I am working on a FAQ about the new organization that I’ll send out in my Desk of Brad next week, if you have any questions that you’d like added to the FAQ, please send them to me.
Let’s go be great!
Brad