Plan Meetings and Communication

A best practice is to plan meetings and communication for your EPM CoE.

Meetings

After you identify the individuals to participate in your organization's CoE, you should define the right meeting cadence and communication plan for your organization.

CoE team members should meet regularly to ensure that everyone is aligned on goals, making progress, and driving consensus. Members can also act as CoE ambassadors to other teams in the organization, for example sharing status at product team meetings. A good practice is for CoE teams to meet weekly or semimonthly, depending on the adoption speed. The full CoE should meet monthly to report on progress.

At the beginning of a transformational process, we have seen some CoE teams who decide to meet on a daily basis. This can be beneficial in cases where the project has executive visibility and the CoE has successfully implemented the first EPM business process in the cloud.

Internal Communication

Communications should also go out on a regular basis to the internal community. To facilitate this, establish a community of practice, and have ambassadors share regular updates, for example, on a wiki, in a distribution list, in a series of videos, or on channel on Microsoft Teams or Slack.

Some organizations create Innovation Labs where they invite colleagues to showcase what they have achieved, share best practices, and see how they can support other projects.

External Communication

You should also plan for external communication. As a best practice, use the resources in Communicate Success and ROI to communicate your success externally and help build relationships, gain recognition, strengthen your network, and promote your brand.

Additional Information

For best practices on external communication, review these stories by Oracle@Oracle that communicate their successes:

• Oracle powers its business with Oracle Cloud
• Adapt to a changing world; Reimagining Oracle’s Planning, Budgeting and Forecasting Processes for an Unpredictable World
• Operations at Oracle with Oracle Cloud EPM, Oracle@Oracle: Our Journey to the Cloud
• Oracle Customer Successes
• Outpace Change with Oracle EPM Cloud

Checklist for Internal CoE Communications

To engage your users, it's a good idea to treat them as customers. A CoE can help ensure successful communication by reflecting on their core values, and then developing self-reflective questions to align communications with their values.

For example, one successful CoE has these core values: Put Customers First; Team Up; Earn Trust, Give Trust; Show Up and Be a Leader; and Innovate and Relentlessly Improve. Based on those core values, the CoE created the following questions. They use these questions as a checklist while crafting internal communications for their users.

Example questions and checklist:

• Put Customers First

  • Do I explain how we are improving our customer experience and helping them deliver results?
  • Do I show how we listened to and understood our customers?
  • Do I clearly lay out how this will help employee's daily work deliver more value to our customers?

• Team Up

  • Do I make clear how we're acting as a single, unified organization?
  • Do I describe how this eliminates barriers?
  • Do I illustrate how we're respecting each other's needs and honoring employees?

• Earn Trust, Give Trust

  • Do I communicate openly and transparently?
  • Do I describe how this eliminates barriers?
  • Do I comment on how we are learning from mistakes?
  • Do I tell how this enables and enhances decentralized decision-making?

• Show Up and Be a Leader

  • Do I show the way forward by aligning people with purpose?
  • Do I emphasize how this helps us focus on organizational priorities, strategy, and objectives?
  • Do I help to unlock employee motivation, empower them with knowledge and autonomy, and celebrate their success?

• Innovate and Relentlessly Improve

  • Do I explain how this transforms us and extends our competitive advantage?
  • Do I put into words how we are being reflective, learning, experimenting, and growing?
  • Do I clarify how we're maintaining a global view and optimizing the whole, not just parts?