March 19, 2025

What Is a Lean-Agile Center of Excellence (LACE) and How Does It Work?

Anuj Ojha

Key Highlights of Lean Agile Center of Excellence

LACE is a small group of change agents who drive real Agile transformation by identifying problems, implementing improvements, and sustaining change across the organization
It helps organizations move beyond isolated Agile efforts by creating a consistent, scalable approach to continuous improvement and better collaboration
The success of LACE depends more on people than structure, especially those who have a lean-agile mindset, strong communication, and a genuine intent to help teams improve
Unlike an Agile PMO, LACE focuses on cultural transformation and long-term agility rather than just processes, governance, or project delivery

Introduction

‘Lean Agile Center of Excellence!’ Isn’t it a fancy name?

Imagine LACE or ‘Lean Agile Center of Excellence’ as a group of people who are passionate about making processes leaner, more efficient and easy to understand for everyone within an organization. Being part of LACE is an additional responsibility they take apart from actively participating in different teams and instrumental in observing the current ways of working, identifying bottlenecks and other improvements. You may think of it as a cohort of representatives from different groups or teams or ARTs who come together to talk about their success, challenges, cross-team collaborations and finding better ways to make organizations more agile by making processes leaner and meaningful.

In this blog we will cover:

What is a Lean Agile Center of Excellence?
Why do organizations need a LACE?
Characteristics of a Lean Agile Center of Excellence
Roles and responsibilities of a Lean Agile Center of Excellence
LACE Models
How is LACE different from an Agile PMO?

What is a Lean Agile Center of Excellence?

LACE is responsible for identifying the change required, finding the best way to implement that change, monitoring the impact and then sustaining the change till we find a better way. We may call the members of LACE also as ‘change agents’. In SAFe or Scaled Agile Framework, the primary responsibility of LACE is to apply SAFe Lean agile practices and bring necessary changes in the behaviors.

The members of LACE are intended to have championed solving critical problems, act as a vital catalyst in bringing the culture of continuous improvement and learning across the organization. However, achieving genuine, sustainable agility at scale requires more than just adopting frameworks, actually it demands a strategic and purposeful approach, one that fosters a culture of continuous improvement and empowers teams to deliver exceptional value.

Why Do Organizations Need a LACE?

Implementing meaningful change, especially at scale, requires a systematic and effective approach. This is why the Lean-Agile Center of Excellence (LACE) is a necessary cohort to build in any organization.

Also, organizations turn to LACE to drive change that works. It’s about moving beyond isolated Agile experiments to a comprehensive, organization-wide transformation. The LACE provides the framework, expertise and guidance to ensure that Agile principles are consistently applied, building a culture of continuous improvement.

In larger enterprises, the LACE delivers an economy of scale. Decentralizing Agile practices are important so that we don’t feel that we are in the shackles of a certain ‘body’, and at the same time we need to have guiding principles which an individual can achieve by applying any set of practices. In the end, agility matters more over the set of practices.

The size and composition of the LACE are crucial for its effectiveness. Successful transformations often see the LACE grow from a core group of a few to multiple teams in larger organizations. But regardless of size, the LACE must always remain a focused and dedicated unit.

What is usually the size of a Lean Agile Center of Excellence Team? Experience has shown that a small team of three to five dedicated individuals can effectively support dozens of practitioners. This focused team can provide coaching, training and guidance, ensuring that Agile practices are implemented consistently and for the right purpose. As organizations grow, so too should their LACE capabilities, with teams doubling in size to support proportionally larger groups.

Characteristics of a Lean Agile Center of Excellence

If you are planning to set up LACE at your workplace or already running it then following characteristics could help you in vetting it:

● Respect your peers

In any situation, even when I might be the dumbest of all, what I expect is a straight-forward feedback from my peers and not disrespect. Nobody deserves that. It is a basic right of everyone to get respect from peers irrespective of their years of experience, incompetency or lack of exposure. We all should treat each other with respect and should be open to share our disappointments or differences with respect and grace.● Motivated to help othersTo be a part of LACE, you should be in a continuous state of finding ways to drive changes or manage changes. It might get stressful when everyone around you expects you to help them and you might be concerned about your own work pressure and might feel it is an overwhelming or unnecessary burden to do so.In that case, you might not be the right fit to be the part of the LACE. It is very important that you should be vocal about your capacity to support others and it is fine if others could help more than you. But stressing over ‘helping’ for the sake of helping is actually not a right mindset that we need to have in LACE members. You should be motivated to help and do not see it as a task to do.● Pragmatic optimistsEach LACE member should be a pragmatic optimist, a person who is hopeful about the future but at the same time focuses on identifying the solution to the problems at hand. It may take time to find the solution to current problems but it shouldn’t discourage, being a LACE member requires being patient, hopeful and focused towards the betterment of the organization.● Lean-Agile mindsetMindset is the outcome of realisation. Why do you want to make things lean? Because you want to make systems efficient. Why do you want to bring agility? Because we want to keep moving continuously towards the right direction. So, what will happen if this mindset is not there? It will create a cohort of people who are simply following the process as it is and think that their job is to follow a checklist.So, it is very important that the change agents who are part of LACE, should have a mindset to continuously respond to changes, simplifying the flow, delivering continuously and bringing improvements to the organization which leads to a lean-agile mindset.● Strong communication skillsIt’s one thing to know what is the right way but to communicate it subtly with the people who are getting affected is also very important. I have met lot of brilliant people and few of them have challenges with their communication skills and it is disheartening to see them failing because the way they communicate doesn’t help in unlocking teams & individuals or resolving the core issues as people get intimidated and even when the problem gets solved, the journey that people experience during that course is quite stressful and chaotic. Therefore, the members of LACE should have impactful communication skills within LACE and with outside stakeholders too.● Influential leadershipInfluencing is a critical trait which can have both positive and negative impact on the cohort. A great influencer knows what will affect their audience and they master the capability to observe, identify and suggest solutions within constraints. The intent matters a lot.Do you want to be popular? Is that why you are influencing others? Or do you want to speak up because you see that nobody is standing up for truth or the right way to do things? If there is a case where the LACE members are not participating enough to meet the purpose then you will like to influence them with the impact it will have on the organization and likewise you will like to encourage them to leverage benefits of effective collaboration.● Expertise in change managementAll the above points lead to expertise in a certain capacity to manage changes effectively. As a LACE member, it is important to understand the journey of a change. Firstly, acknowledge the fact that you as a change-agent are important but a business could run without you, a team could still deliver a qualitative product without you, even an organization can be unicorn without having any of the change-agent. So, why is this role needed?A journey of a change-agent should start with appreciating what is working for the target group. Then identifying the goal where the group wants to reach and then analysing the gaps that are hindering success. Also, there are constraints to respect like budget, time, scope, technology and people which needs to be looked upon as they may be the potential causes of challenges to reach to the aspired goalAfter observing all the aspects, a change-agent needs to find out multiple ways to address those challenges and partner with all the parties involved to find the best solution. This needs patience, eye for detail and relentlessness to support the target group in improving their experience.Roles and Responsibilities of LACELean Agile Center of Excellence or LACE is primarily built to bring excellence in the system by identifying changes and seamlessly introducing the better ways to manage and incorporate them. Following are the roles and responsibilities of the LACE:

Providing strategic guidance to target group and bringing alignment

Provide required training and coaching to ensure impact of change

Standardising process wherever required & balancing autonomy

Documenting best practices for learning

Partnering with target groups or internally for product solving

Identify best practices to measure and report progress

Building communities & contributing to strengthening culture

According to SAFe, following are the responsibilities of LACE:

Supporting Lean Portfolio Management (LPM)
Coaching leadership
Facilitating the transformation
Managing the transformation backlog
Fostering lean-agile learning

Lean Agile Center of Excellence Organizational ModelsBased on the size of the organization and how the work is organized, LACE models vary. Following are the 3 models that SAFe proposes for LACE and we could learn from it:

Centralized Model – For a smaller size organization, one LACE group should be sufficient to drive the changes

Decentralized Model – In organizations with multiple portfolios, respective LACE could collaborate with each other to solve cross-portfolio issues and standardising practices, wherever necessary

Hub-and-Spoke (Hybrid) Model – To bring alignment between multiple LACEs, there could be a centralized LACE, which coordinates with representatives of individual LACEs to drive org-wide initiatives

How does LACE differ from an Agile PMO?Agile PMO is actually a PMO who has realised the essence of agility and wants to balance the project management practices with aspects that require agility and come up with the practices that could help the projects within organizations to be structured and at the same time has ability to respond to changes. Few responsibilities of the Agile PMO are:

They focus more on delivery value to customer instead of adhering to practices and procedures

The PMO evaluation of project factors the need for change and relevant metrics to capture the impact of it

Instead of playing the role of auditors, now the Agile PMO are more like enablers that are helping the project teams to succeed by being more proactive than reactive in their approaches

Imbibing the element of faster delivery by improvising planning of deliverables

Helping teams with mechanisms to adapt to changing requirements and being flexible

Improve transparency at all levels for better collaboration

LACE is not just a PMO, it has agility at the heart of it and doesn’t restrict itself to process and procedures and it partners with all levels to bring harmony in the system.ConclusionAs you might have learnt that, LACE has become the linchpin of successful transformations, scaling from small, dedicated teams to powerful engines of change in larger organizations. But the real value is not in the structure alone, it is in the PEOPLE. It is in the individuals who are respected by their peers, motivated to help, and possess that pragmatic optimism that turns vision into reality.

A LACE is not just about implementing processes. It is about building a culture. It is about fostering collaboration, removing obstacles, and empowering teams to deliver their best work. It is about ensuring that when we discuss ‘key initiatives progress’ or ‘action items’ or ‘next steps’, we are not just ticking boxes, but driving meaningful outcomes.NextAgile is an outcome driven SAFe Agile consulting firm with a proven track record of successful turnkey agile transformation across domains and industries. We provide custom, tailored approaches to solve organisation problems like execution certainty, siloed mode of working, transparency, lack of predictability, streamlining workflows and processes, scaling agile adoption, reduced time to market and increased customer satisfaction leveraging our indepth agile transformation experience and expert agile practitioners.With this, our blog on “Lean Agile Center of Excellence – A strategic driver for enterprise agility” comes to an end. We sincerely hope this has helped our readers get some clarity around it. We would be glad to discuss your unique agility adoption bottlenecks at NextAgileAgile Transformation consulting and support your agile journey. Please write to us at “consult@nextagile.ai” for any further feedback or recommendations or in case you are looking for external consulting support while establishing your Lean Agile Center of Excellence during your organizational agile transformation journey.Frequently Asked Questions about Lean Agile Center of Excellence1. What frameworks does LACE support?The mention of LACE is primarily used in the context of SAFe or Scaled Agile Framework. Even the organizations that are applying other scaling frameworks, they could also incorporate LACE (may be under other banner names whatever suits well).2. Can a small or mid-sized company benefit from LACE, or is it only for enterprises?Definitely a mid-sized company could benefit from LACE. It is just that it doesn’t need a lot of people. The role and responsibilities would remain the same.3. How long does it take to establish an effective LACE?It starts with identifying the purpose, vision, the initiatives to drive, identifying the key members and then setting up the cadence in alignment with the key strategic stakeholders. It could take 3-5 weeks for a LACE function to start functioning.4. Does LACE only focus on IT teams, or can it support other business units?LACE could support any function in the organization that is responsible for delivering value to business and customers. At its core, its contribution is towards bringing maturity in change management activities.5. Should LACE be a permanent function or a temporary initiative?It should be a permanent function as the changes are inevitable in an organization’s growth journey and the support from LACE could help in bringing agility and drive the transformation, which is a continuous process.

Anuj Ojha

Anuj Ojha is Co-Founder & Consulting Head at NextAgile. Anuj has designed & led multiple turnkey transformation journeys across industries, domains & geographies and has 16+ years of experience as an agile practitioner. He has worked with CXOs, CTOs & Key Leaders to translate their business objectives on the ground, contextualizing org transformations and creating buy-in across level, leading a team of coaches/consultants to implement agility across 150+ teams & trained more than 12k team members. Anuj’s core area of interest is business agility & working with leaders & teams to achieve long term sustainable, Agile culture & mindset.

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