Build the Team and Community of Practice

To build your EPM CoE, create a multidisciplinary team that sponsors and guides your Cloud EPM adoption, or even your Finance transformation.

Your organization can accelerate this adoption and transformation by creating a multidisciplinary team that includes executive sponsors, key stakeholders, Finance representatives, and the business and technical implementation teams. Executive sponsors are especially important for transformational projects with a top-down approach.

Because the technology in EPM can be adopted in a modular fashion, some customers implement one business process in one division as a proof-of-concept in a bottom-up approach. In both cases, having a CoE is important for providing guidance, consistency, and lessons learned, as described in Why Do I Need an EPM CoE?

The CoE should oversee the entire EPM cloud initiative as it leads your organizational change management process. If necessary, the CoE also develops a workforce readiness plan and serves as a steering committee for cloud standards and policy definition. The CoE also manages the cloud adoption roadmap, tracks features and enhancement requests, and responds to escalations.

The following table identifies the key roles from your organization to include in your CoE, as well as their responsibilities. We recommend that you identify the names of specific individuals who are responsible for each function.

Table 2-6 Center of Excellence Team

Strategy Component	Your Information	Responsibilities
Executive team	Chief executive officer or Chief financial officer VP of Finance Director of Finance VP of Finance Transformation Note: In smaller companies, the chief executive officer or chief financial officer typically takes on responsibilities with the CoE. In larger companies, these responsibilities are usually fulfilled by the VP of Finance, VP of Financial Planning and Analysis, Controller, Director of Finance, or VP of Finance Transformation.	Drive the focus on organizational goals for cloud adoption Validate and sponsor the cloud adoption business case Sponsor the changes in people, processes, and technology
Business team	Business owner	Evangelize the value of cloud adoption for each business unit or department involved in the EPM Cloud adoption process
	Business subject matter expert (can be the same person as the business owner)	Contribute to the understanding of the current process and determine benefits for implementing in the cloud; this also includes understanding the existing interfaces, and how these are impacted by moving from on-premises to the cloud, or to a net new cloud
	Finance	Allocate resources to the cloud adoption initiative
Technical team	IT owner	Define the IT solution and remove siloed teams, siloed releases, and siloed operations. Support regression testing for the solution.
	Lead application architect (internal or implementation partner)	Optimize data flows and streamline integrations
Project Manager	Project Manager	Keep the timeline of the deliverables and communicate to all internal stakeholders

To maintain momentum with your cloud adoption initiative, the CoE should address escalations and resolve blockers promptly. You can facilitate the solution process by clearly identifying and documenting the owners for each area of responsibility in your CoE.

Ambassadors

Sometimes, organizations also create a network of key stakeholders or ambassadors to the enterprise, as shown in the following example. These ambassadors share best practices, evangelize change to peers within their business unit, and ensure feedback, such as opportunities and challenges.

After you have identified the team members, start planning for regular meetings and updates.