AI & Software Engineering CoE (2020-23) - Head of Centres of Excellence
The Customer: The Entire Organisation & Strategic Clients
The Users: Engineering, Data Science, and Sales & Bid Teams
The Challenge
Our organization was fundamentally handicapped by its own silos. Business units often viewed each other as competitors, leading to a culture of duplicated effort and a chronic lack of information sharing. This meant we were constantly building bespoke, non-reusable point solutions for similar client problems. The consequences were severe: we were losing strategic bids we should have won due to fragmented responses, and we were struggling on the delivery of projects by failing to apply lessons learned from past engagements. We were operating inefficiently and failing to bring our collective strength to bear for our clients.
The Approach
To break down these barriers and build a unified technical capability, I proposed and established the organization's first Centres of Excellence (CoE) for AI Innovation and Software Engineering. My strategy was to create a collaborative fabric connecting our disparate teams:
- Community-Driven Model: We structured the CoEs on the highly successful UK Government Digital Service (GDS) community model. This approach focuses on fostering shared best practices, peer learning, and collective ownership rather than top-down control.
- Unified Vision & Governance: I secured senior leadership buy-in from across all business units to form CoE boards. Together, we drove consensus on a shared vision and a set of KPIs focused on collaboration, re-use, and innovation that everyone could support.
- Fostering Collaboration: We launched a vibrant program of show & tells, hackathons, and roadshows, featuring presenters from inside the business and from strategic partners like Palantir, Google, and Microsoft. These events became the primary mechanism for sharing ideas and breaking down cultural barriers.
- Strategic Orchestration on Bids: The CoEs acted as a 'Strategic Orchestrator'. I created forums where sales leaders could present client challenges directly to our technical communities. This allowed us to proactively form the best cross-functional teams and co-create powerful, unified solutions for our most important bids.
- Developing Our People: To support our talent, we designed and implemented the first unified career framework for AI and software engineering, providing clear and exciting growth paths for staff across the entire organization.
The Outcome
The establishment of the CoEs fundamentally changed how we operated. By fostering a "one team" culture, we significantly improved our win rate on strategic bids. The intense focus on collaboration and best practices led to a measurable increase in the re-use of solutions and code, which lowered our bid costs and accelerated project delivery schedules. Furthermore, by connecting our technical talent directly with client challenges, we unlocked a new engine for internal and client-facing innovation, rapidly testing ideas through hackathons and PoCs. This new, collaborative environment and the clear career paths we created resulted in improved retention of our key technical staff, who were now more engaged and empowered.