Centres of Excellence
The Centres of Excellence are where the value is made. Each centre is a pool of technical people who share a domain of expertise, and it serves pre-sales, project delivery, ongoing support and proactive optimisation from the same pool. This replaces separate pre-sales, professional services and managed services teams working at different skill levels.
Where the idea comes from
Etienne Wenger's work on communities of practice showed that knowledge moves through an organisation informally, between people who share an interest, when nothing gets in the way. Many organisations have tried to formalise this. The common failure is leadership interference: once management tries to control the learning, the community stops behaving like one.
The term Centre of Excellence usually describes a small expert group whose job is to share its knowledge across the organisation. CUSCOE takes that idea further and makes every service delivery function a Centre of Excellence, with five principles designed to keep the social learning of a community of practice alive inside a formal structure.
Principle 1: Competency-based membership
Membership of a centre is earned by demonstrating the minimum technical level the centre requires. The Centre of Excellence Lead sets the assessment for the domain. Anyone who fails receives targeted training and is retested. A second failure means they are not a member of that centre.
People can belong to more than one centre, and the model encourages it because it lets the business deploy the same people across different technologies. Failing one centre's assessment does not threaten anyone's job. However, everyone must qualify for at least one centre. Failing to qualify for any is treated as a mismatch between the person and the role, not as poor performance, and is handled with HR under local employment law.
Where a vendor or external body certifies competence, that certification can be used to set levels.
Principle 2: Skill transparency
The organisation keeps a clear, visible matrix of each person's capability, so that work is allocated to the right level of person whether the task is pre-sales, a project or support. The matrix is updated as people progress, as people join and leave, and as the Portfolio changes.
Assessment results convert to a ten-level scale in three bands:
| Levels | Band | How they are deployed |
|---|---|---|
| L1 to L3 | Foundation | Building capability and domain knowledge. Supervised deployment on lower-complexity work, with structured learning. |
| L4 to L7 | Practitioner | Independent delivery, client-facing, owning workstreams. The core delivery resource. Mentors Foundation members. |
| L8 to L10 | Expert | Specialist authority, solution design and strategy, the senior subject matter expert before and during engagements. Not used on routine work. Coaches others and advocates for the centre. |
Grading can hurt morale when someone lands below where they rated themselves. The model handles this by presenting the grade as a training path with clear progression and rewards attached. The matrix should be detailed enough to show each person which areas to work on and what mentoring they need. A side benefit is that rate cards and pay scales can be standardised against the levels.
Principle 3: Technical leadership
Each centre is led by a principal technical resource, the Centre of Excellence Lead. The Lead sets the assessments, grades members, identifies skill gaps and defines training needs, which protects the organisation's knowledge through technology changes and staff turnover. Because the Lead is a respected expert in the domain and writes the assessments, members are more likely to accept the results, including when a grade comes in below their own estimate.
Leads are expected to share knowledge with each other, so the centres do not turn into new silos.
Principle 4: Managerial independence
The Lead must not be a line manager. Line management authority gets in the way of honest technical conversation between peers, and it pulls the Lead out of hands-on engineering, which erodes their skill. The Lead's role is technical leadership and mentoring.
Line management of centre members therefore sits outside the centre, which separates questions of competence from questions of performance. This creates a need for dedicated line-management roles that some organisations will not have. The capacity can often be found in project management, in HR, among technical staff who want to move into management, or among people who do not meet a centre's technical standard but have strong non-technical skills. Allowing the Lead to keep doing some customer-facing work also helps recover the cost. The approach is similar to the split between capability development and delivery management in McKinsey's helix model.
Principle 5: Executive advocacy
A named executive, referred to here as the Centre of Excellence Director, is responsible across all the centres. The Director has two jobs.
The first is protection. When another part of the business tries to get around the skill matrix, for example by putting an unsupervised Foundation member on Expert-level work to protect margin, the Director steps in. Having this authority at executive level keeps the Leads out of line-management politics, so the peer-to-peer learning can continue.
The second is governance. The Director keeps assessment, reporting and standards consistent across centres, makes sure the centres follow the strategy of the business and work together, opens new centres when the business expands or acquires, closes centres that are no longer needed, and moves people between centres as demand changes. The Director line-manages the Leads in their role as Leads. The Leads have no line-management authority over members.
What the centres own
- In: the delivery standard for each Portfolio offering, and the capability it requires.
- Out: delivery performance and utilisation data.
- Owns: AI capability, meaning model selection, evaluation, prompt engineering and optimisation. Tool and model choices are reviewed by IT and compliance.
Delivering to the customer is a direct centre function. Commercial contact is not. Scope and delivery-standard disputes go through Customer Success.
Evidence status
These five principles were evaluated against an illustrative scenario in the KMIS 2026 paper. They have not yet been tested in a published live study.