As organizations of all sizes face the need to embrace digital transformation, it is no surprise that interest in citizen development programs is increasing.
With IT spending most of its time (and budget) on keeping the lights on , it's difficult for companies to embrace widespread digital transformation. This causes IT to not respond to the organization's need for change
The constant backlog of projects is why many organizations are turning to citizen developers and low-code/no-code software development platforms. While citizen development programs are not new, the COVID-19 pandemic and the accompanying digital transformation are causing CIOs to take a second look at low-code/no-code platforms.
For CIOs contemplating these programs, the biggest challenge is not deciding whether they need them (they do), but rather getting buy-in from their peers in the C-suite and line-of-business managers.
Create a vision
The first step to getting buy-in is creating a vision. After all, to get where you want, you need to know where you want to be. All successful citizen development programs start by understanding three things: your current state, your ideal state, and why you want to make change.
Current state versus ideal state
In most organizations, business units hit IT with more project requests than can be fulfilled. Projects large and small go unresolved or take a long time to complete. This lack of business responsiveness fuels the ongoing perception that IT is where projects die.
If this description of the current state is rather bleak, then the ideal state would logically be its opposite, right? Well, sort of. In real life, this doesn't happen most of the time. So the point of defining your ideal state is to set a goal that you will constantly work towards, but that you probably won't achieve. Without a stretch goal, as they are known, you are unlikely to make significant progress in solving the problems that are actually solvable.
Other interested parties
Once you have the vision and direction, it's time to engage with other stakeholders to sell them on the idea. Since everyone probably knows what the problems are, it's important to sell them on the program's benefits, not its features. It will save them time, increase their bottom line, and smooth out the kinks in their workflows – these are the types of results that will get stakeholders on your side.
The script
Like any new initiative, you need to start slowly, get some “easy” wins (the proverbial low hanging fruit ), and get stakeholder buy-in. Only then can you expand to give the program the momentum it needs to succeed across the organization.
Once established, there is no limit to what can be accomplished using citizen developers. Today's low-code/no-code platforms are used for highly complex customer-facing projects or for things as simple as adding a new field to a form on a web page.
Start small
The first step of your program will involve engaging with a low-code/no-code vendor to get it up and running. You can then create a playbook that defines parameters and defines the role of the citizen developer.
The first pass through the manual does not need to be definitive. Think of it more as a framework or outline that defines things like project deliverables and artifacts, project checkpoints and IT approvals/handoffs, standards and best practices, the processes that citizen developers need to follow, and roles and responsibilities and other structures program governance. IT's role in this process will be primarily supervisory, so look to them for guidance.
Once the manual is ready, ask some willing IT people to learn the platform. They will serve as coaches for less tech-savvy entrepreneurs who will become citizen developers in the future.
Once you have a few individuals trained in the basics, look for projects that are intra -departmental and use data from that department. Automating processes that rely on manual data entry into Excel spreadsheets are great candidates.
Scale quickly
After a few initial wins, see what went right, what went wrong, and where you can improve. Adjust the manual and then go back and do another project. You can increase the complexity of the project as your confidence grows.
More complex projects are typically cross -departmental and use shared data sets. They involve formulas, some custom coding, and integrations with other applications. These projects often require IT to test them before going into production. Project design and development responsibilities are also shared with IT.
IT will seek to ensure that new workflows take into account any organizational standards (such as appropriate branding), maintain data privacy and integrity, are secure, and do not negatively impact application performance.
Highly complex projects
As time goes by, you can start to deal with highly complex projects. These projects are often customer-facing, require custom coding, rely on interdepartmental data, and can impact incorrectly coded operations. In fact, IT can do much of the design and development work here, but it will still use the low-code/no-code platform to do so.
Following
As you move through this process, it's worth tracking your progress by focusing on a few Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that will tell you whether you're succeeding. These KPIs can be things like reducing the software development project backlog, improving the timely delivery of changes, improving workflows, and/or improving the timeliness of IT responsiveness. All of this constitutes good ideal state objectives that can be achieved with a citizen development program.
Climbing
As you accumulate wins, you can build on these early successes by identifying more projects and training more citizen developers to complete them. When you have citizen developers, you can create a small community to foster cooperation and share best practices.
Some organizations even create a citizen developer Center of Excellence (CoE) to oversee the program and share guidelines and best practices.
As organizations of all sizes face the need to embrace digital transformation, they need to utilize every tool in the application development toolkit. Given the long and successful history of low-code/no-code platforms for reducing project delays, it is no surprise that interest in citizen development is increasing.
