Organizational Model: The Centre of Excellence

In this example model, the Centre of Excellence (COE) is a centralized capability responsible for automated projects from pipeline to deployment and run.

This is one of the most common approaches to deploying RPA within an organization. The COE acts as the ultimate authority for RPA and Intelligent Automation.

The COE ensures consistent delivery standards, training and service through tacit knowledge management and implementation of lessons learned. 

COE

 

How do processes flow through the organization?

The Business Area

Each Business Area provides automation opportunities to the COE which is then prioritized via a governance forum. The Business works with the COE to define and test processes. They also submit change requests and incidents to the COE as and when required.

The Centre of Excellence

The COE are responsible for: Process Discovery, PDD, SDD, access, build, test, release, ongoing support, best practice, and license utilization. Within the COE, delivery teams work with the Customer Process SMEs from the business areas to define and test automation builds.

The COE team has a mixed skill-set including: Analysts, Project Managers, Scrum Masters, Developers, Architects, Controllers who will span all business areas.

It is important to note than in this model it is possible to delegate the following tasks to the business areas to release time and resource in the COE to focus more on the delivery:

  • Process Discovery ( including impact assessment and business case)
  • PDD

Benefits

  • Simple to set up
  • Simple to scale (just hire more)
  • Ensures a consistent delivery and service model
  • Ensures that consistent design standards are adopted within the organization
  • Enables a single consistent method of training resources
  • Manage team/skill set in a more traditional method

 

Challenges

  • Can be costly to scale up
  • Prioritization is often debated
  • Can create a bottleneck if the pipeline becomes too big
  • Works as a shared service and relies on good communication and selling of automation as a service
Help getting started

Blue Prism’s Success Accelerator program combines various levels of mentorship and access to our Expert Services, Technology Ecosystem and Certified Partners based on the size and maturity of your digital workforce operations.

Success Accelerators