Citizen Development Insights

Since my last post I have received great feedback on what made the Agile Manifesto successful as well as what areas that could have been improved.  The area that caught my interest the most was how the 2001 Agile Manifesto lacked a robust change mechanism.

This will also be the topic of today’s post, which I will start off by disclosing the results from a poll issued on January 11, 2021.

It is worth noting that while the opinion seems to be that the Manifesto would have benefitted from a robust change mechanism, the consensus still is that he Agile Manifesto stood the test of time (see my previous blog post). 

Implementing a robust mechanism to manage change

When asked about it, you also brought up some very interesting considerations if such a mechanism was to be implemented:

·       Having controls in place to prevent that the direction takes a turn for the worse

·       Ensuring that someone is there to appropriately manage the change mechanism

·       The possibility to track the history of changes made to the Manifesto

·       Ensuring that changes are infrequent and necessary

Needless to say a great deal of responsibility is associated with managing such change.

The role of the group

Another area that interests me is the composition of the Agile Alliance. Trying to understand what makes a group successful with their objectives is a challenging task and there are universal guidelines meant to indicate what potential a group like the Agile Alliance has with achieving its objectives. These guidelines includes criteria such as diversity (e.g. gender, cognitive, ethnic etc.), independence and to what degree the members are conflicted. What do you think is the most important trait for the members of a group that is creating a Manifesto? If you have a view, please go ahead and answer our poll here.

Welcome to the world of citizen development.

Amazing things happen here in the world of citizen development. If you’ve been in it a while, you already know how incredible it is to watch an idea go from spark to screen in days or even hours. If you’re new to citizen development, get ready for a fascinating new reality.

This post is the third in a series that will introduce you to elements on the PMI Citizen Development Canvas (see below). These blogs are designed to inspire you, share tips and insight, and further your knowledge and experience. I welcome your questions and encourage you to share your own stories in the comments.

I am glad you’re here.

Last month I introduced you to Ideation 2.0. This month, I will introduce you to Suitability Assessments.

Suitability Assessments - what are they and why are they important?

Is a project you’re considering suitable for a low-code/no-code (LCNC) solution? There’s an easy way to find out before you begin.

The term “suitability assessment” sounds long and drawn out, but in the LCNC world, it is a simple series of questions that can be quickly answered and rated by Citizen Developers. The questions spring from two sets of criteria:

1. Is the citizen development process the right fit for the proposed solution?
2. Does the company have the skills, tools, capacity, and buy-in to support the proposed solution?

Let’s take a look at how one company performed its suitability assessment and the final results.

Situation: A manufacturing company needed a new way to manage its vendor relationships.  A team was assembled from each of the following departments: Partner Management, Accounting, Legal, Sales, and Operations. Through Ideation 2.0, the team identified the need for a solution to track communications, interactions, jobs, invoices, legal documentation, pricing, and general services on each of their vendors. The team favored the idea of a LCNC app, but the Citizen Developer wisely decided to conduct a suitability assessment to ensure it is a good fit for the project and the company.

Before: The vendor list within the manufacturing company is growing exponentially, and each department has cobbled together workflows specific to their department. Each department stored key data about vendors without visibility across all departments, creating unnecessary silos and miscommunication. There was no single source of truth.

Process: The team performed a suitability assessment in less than 20 minutes by using two tools found in the Citizen Development: The Handbook for Creators and Change Makers. 

The first tool they used was the Suitability Assessment Scorecard. The scorecard helped the squad determine if the proposed solution was appropriate for a citizen development project. The simple scoring method was:

        YES (the statement is true): 2 points

        NO (the statement is not true): 0 points

        Neither YES or NO (somewhere in the middle): 1 point

In general, the higher the score, the better the fit for a LCNC project.

Suitability Assessment Scorecard

With a score of 13 out of 14, the Citizen Developer classified the project as one which would be suitable for a citizen development solution.

The second tool the squad used was the Environmental Check. This tool helped them assess the suitability of citizen development from a corporate perspective. These questions weren’t scored but were discussed among the team.

Environmental Check

After: The big ah-ha for the team was the answer to the question, “Is there a tool within your organization that satisfies the requirements for this solution?” Until that moment, the squad hadn’t realized their existing CRM included a module to support what they each needed. By activating the vendor module and increasing the license count for the existing tool, the team was able to efficiently meet their stated goals. With the solution already in existence, it made more sense in this situation to use the existing CRM rather than create a new app. 

Suitability assessment tips:

As a Citizen Developer, I see the opportunity to develop solutions around every corner, yet LCNC tools aren’t always the answer. My overriding passion is to equip teams with the tools to help them work more efficiently, and that’s why I run each citizen development project through basic suitability assessments before launching into development.

Experience has taught me to:

• Keep an open mind about possible solutions. 
• Ask lots of questions - how, why, when, who, what, where? Go deep!
• Understand the corporate landscape and the capacity of the LCNC tool I am using

Suitability assessments are your friend. They make sure that the projects you are working on are appropriate for the citizen development app and will fit within the organization.

What did this post spark in you? Are you new to no-code/low-code app creation? Have you used a suitability assessment in your company? Please post your questions, comments, and stories below.

Want to learn more? Grab your copy of the newly released book Citizen Development: The Handbook for Creators and Change Makers.

Introduction

When citizen development is discussed, the focus tends to be on the empowerment of business users to create their own applications. However, there is a lack of available resources that detail how those applications should be maintained in contrast with traditional software.

Types of Applications

Applications which are managed by end-users have been around for a number of years. We refer to some of these applications as “Shadow IT”. Shadow IT apps are most of times maintained by their creators. There are discrepancies as to how tolerant organizations can be to Shadow IT’s existence (see Liz Jordan’s blog on Shadow IT for more detail: https://www.projectmanagement.com/blog-post/68155/Is-citizen-development-just-a-form-of-sanctioned-shadow-IT-). However, there is a general consensus in industry that Shadow IT is pernicious and occurs every time that software is created without having been sanctioned by the IT / Technology department.

Shadow IT is Pernicious

As a management consultant, I’ve come across organizations that have the necessary controls in place to prevent business users from creating Shadow IT applications. Others have a significant reliance of their business knowledge in Shadow IT applications, even without knowing. My point being, the maintenance of Shadow IT applications has been performed by the end users without the involvement of the IT / Technology department. And that’s a dangerous approach because these individuals usually don’t have the knowledge nor the tools to perform a proper holistic maintenance.

Maintenance for Citizen Development

Citizen development enables a new paradigm where maintenance tasks can be shared between Citizen Developers and the IT / Technology department. If I create an application that reduces some of my most tedious day-to-day activities by, let’s say 10% of my daily workday, I can dedicate some of that time to maintain and improve my application.

Different types of Maintenance

In the software development world, it is widely accepted that between 60-80% of the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for enterprise systems is dedicated to their maintenance and to keep them running. There are four maintenance types accounting for this 60-80% of TCO, being:

• Corrective maintenance – Amend mistakes and/or bugs created during the development phase
• Adaptive maintenance – Update the applications to be in tune with the organization’s wider environment or improve the applications’ running performance
• Perfective maintenance – Upgrade the applications to include new functionalities
• Preventive maintenance – Attend minor current issues that could cause more serious problems in the future

The essence of these tasks is no different than traditional IT tasks. However, the way these tasks are done and who performs them changes. Let’s take a look at how citizen development impacts each of these 4 maintenance types.

Corrective maintenance 

The Citizen Developer is the best placed individual to detect bugs, identify a solution and implement it. Detecting bugs at first-hand avoids having to request upgrades to the IT department and then observe how that request is put into a list of priorities. In the majority of cases, Citizen Developers can eradicate these bugs if they are a proficient using the selected Low-Code / No-Code platform.

Tip- create a Competency Centre (or similar internal body), able to guide Citizen Developers through the process of solving common development bugs. These can be put into procedures as the maturity of the organization with regards to citizen development evolves.

Adaptive maintenance

It seems difficult to envisage how citizen development could help improve adaptive maintenance from the point of view of the citizens. They usually do not have the knowledge, competency or permission to manage an IT operating environment. It is too risky to put technical, hardware or security changes (to name a few), in the hands of citizens.

Hence, the benefit of using citizen development with regards to adaptive maintenance comes when the environment is sanctioned and provided by your IT department. Firstly, because all the applications created in the business are centralised as a consequence of using sanctioned low-code/no-code platforms and can be addressed as a whole instead of performing ad-hoc maintenance. Secondly, the IT department now has control over some assets that were previously Shadow IT.

Perfective maintenance

Citizen Developers may want to include new functionalities in their apps. There is no need to wait for the IT department to prioritise your requirements when you can do it yourself. This will enhance deployment time and will help save some valuable resources in the IT department.

Preventive maintenance

It is difficult to get a glimpse of how preventive maintenance can benefit from citizen development. Having said that, citizen development initiatives will ideally be carried out following a set of best practices that enables better evolution and scalability of software. These guidelines can be governed either by the IT department or by a Competency Centre or similar body.

This takes us back to the idea of the IT department being a partner of the business that facilitates and controls the environment.

Summary

1. Citizen Developers are best placed to perform corrective maintenance without the need to rely on the IT department.
2. IT acting as a facilitator can agglutinate and centralise adaptive maintenance for a higher number of applications (some of those were previously Shadow IT).
3. Citizen Developers speed up the process of perfecting applications, freeing capacity in the IT department so that they can continue to work on other priorities.
4. Citizen Developers that follow best-practice guidelines when creating software will spawn a better future evolution and scalability of the apps created.

Conclusion

Citizen Development has the potential to help IT / Technology departments with their maintenance duties. As a result, there will be more control over the maintenance of IT assets in the organization as well as more capacity to take on other priorities, and an upskilled workforce will better understand the technology environment and how to take care of it.

In the past, programming and software development skills were restricted to IT professionals only. Lengthy software development cycles coupled with long waiting times created many issues for organisations. However, times are changing.

The demand to simplify and shorten software development cycles has led to the exponential and continuous growth of Citizen Development with the use of low-code and no-code (LCNC) development platforms.

Who is a Citizen Developer?

A Citizen Developer is essentially a business user who can build applications without requiring programming knowledge. From HR departments to Finance, citizen development creates a space for any business user to optimize an existing business process or improve their day-to-day productivity with low code or no code technology that is sanctioned by IT.

Moreover, it empowers users to drive innovation in a cost-effective and timely manner by reducing application development life-cycles. 

The idea of end-users self-building digital solutions is not new.

However, organisations’ understanding of the power of citizen development is increasingly becoming familiar. Organisations who have adopted this approach have improved resilience, user experience and their responsiveness to the ever-changing market demands.

In fact, Gartner states, by 2023 the quantity of citizen developers within larger enterprises will be, at a minimum, 4 times the number of professional developers.

Low-code and no-code tools accelerate Citizen Development

Before LCNC development platforms, non-IT departments solely depended on IT for new solutions. For example, people in an organisation who needed solutions to do work more efficiently would need to wait for months or sometimes years for IT to deliver solutions.

Back-logs of requests, shortages of software developers and long waiting times are only some of the issues that can arise and cause serious disruptions in any business.

Citizen development powered by no code and low code technologies enables rapid development and deployment from business users in an agile manner, something previously difficult to achieve with traditional software development approach.

No-code and low code platforms allow users to focus on creating applications by using a toolset of prebuilt components, rules and actions, rather than developing everything from scratch.

Not only does citizen development accelerate innovation, but also it increases overall efficiencies.

In effect, citizen development offers a real opportunity for IT and the rest of the business to work collaboratively.

Citizen Development closes the gap between IT and Non-IT departments

An effective and IT-approved low-code or no-code technology can seal the skill gap between professional developers and citizen developers.

Typically, there has always been a gap between the implementer of a technical solution and the business user who has the business knowledge.

Knowing the requirements, it makes sense for said business user to create the application to address these particular requirements.

With a user-friendly development environment, citizen developers can easily build applications themselves and if and when, a project becomes too complex, they can simply invite a professional developer to help. 

Citizen development reduces workload on IT teams, essentially freeing them to focus on more complex projects that indefinitely require technical skills. Not to mention, the ability for citizen developers to take projects off from IT hands reduces back-logs of required solutions and speeds up the application development process.

In addition, the utilisation of low-code and no-code platforms can provide stakeholders equal insight into the application development process. Many LCNC platforms can give IT visibility into the development process of an application by a business user. This governs shadow IT as it provides an opportunity for IT teams to monitor and control quality and security.

What Does Citizen Development Mean for Organisations?

The demand for business applications is certainly increasing as more companies seek new ways to boost productivity while reducing costs. With that said, IT cannot do it alone.

While professional developers and IT departments are the typical experts, traditional software development is simply too time-consuming.

In past years, to address a company’s digitalisation needs, it was routine to hire a team of software developers and spend large budgets on multi-year implementation projects. Only to come to a conclusion that still, despite investing a considerable quantity of time and money, efforts did not address the core needs of the business.

The flexibility of LCNC tools enable organisations to address their individual digitalisation needs by enabling business users to create new applications and adjust these applications as the requirements evolve.

Acquiring this level of internal power allows quick and easy digitalisation of typical business processes in quality, HR, finance and other departments.

In addition, leveraging talent in-house brings better control over operational costs. Organisations do not need to outsource software development or hire additional IT staff. Instead, IT and business can effectively work together to produce better outcomes.

By 2022, Forrester expects the low-code/no-code market to reach $21.2 billion. Certainly, this reflects the speed that LCNC development platforms are growing at.

I believe organisations will adopt citizen development because it is compelling. It opens up a whole new world of opportunities for digital innovation.

Do you think it is important for organisations to adopt a citizen development approach today? Does your organisation already have a citizen development approach?

My experience of Shadow IT

As long as IT has existed, it seems that shadow IT has existed as well. I distinctly remember one of my first projects as a junior consultant where I was tasked with mapping an enterprise’s finance processes. I had carefully drafted detailed process maps based on the enterprise’s policies and procedures. I sat down with the client’s finance lead only to be told, “ That’s how it’s supposed to work, but here’s how it actually works…” Due to issues with the legacy system, an entire shadow finance system had been created. A few quick conversations with my colleagues in industry confirmed that my experience is not unique – and this is further corroborated by a McAfee study stating that 81% of Line of Business users use shadow IT.

Impact and Cost of Shadow IT

The impact and cost of shadow IT is massive. Gartner estimates that large enterprises spend 30 – 40 percent of their budget on shadow IT. Research from Everest group puts that estimate even higher - 50 percent or more. Additional impacts can include duplicated efforts, multiple sources of truth and security vulnerabilities, to name a few.

Is Citizen Development Shadow IT?

Given enterprises’ experiences and the cost of shadow IT, it’s not surprising that there is hesitation around the concept of citizen development. Phrases like “empower business users” are frequently espoused, but, cynically, isn’t citizen development just shadow IT in a different wrapper? If an enterprise is encouraging end business users to develop their own applications, is it sanctioning shadow IT and all the costs and issues that come with it?

Citizen Development is not Shadow IT

Personally, I strongly disagree with that sentiment, but it’s easy to see how someone could reach that conclusion. A PMI survey found that lack of IT governance and control is one of the top three barriers for increased adoption of low-code/no-code platforms.

Link between Citizen Development and Shadow IT

For enterprises to feel comfortable deploying and scaling citizen development, the concern of shadow IT and rogue software must be addressed head-on. PMI’s latest handbook, “Citizen Development: The Handbook for Creators and Change Makers,” starts to do just that.

PMI clearly states that effectively deploying citizen development isn’t about circumventing existing controls or finding work arounds. As stated by PMI, effective deployment requires enterprises to “engage with IT to excel in citizen development. IT needs to be a collaborative partner, the owner of access and permission controlling, as well as in charge of the protection and security of information.”

The right governance model allows enterprises to find the balance between empowering the business user while controlling and managing risks.  

Equilibrium

Praveen Seshadri, the founder of AppSheet (a no-code platform) and now a Distinguished Software Engineer with Google, describes how enterprises can strike this balance: “So IT departments could easily say nobody can build an app that doesn't force sign in. And all the sign in must be through this identity provider and have your account access this data. And if you do, I'm going to know about it right away.” In this example, the business user still has the capacity to create and develop applications, but IT still retains full control. Rather than IT being developed in the shadows, it is carried out in the open with the full awareness of the IT department.

Conclusion

Not surprisingly, rather than fearing citizen development, with the potential for better oversight and control, IT department are embracing the low-code-/no-code movement. Coming back to Praveen, “That's one of the things that we're observing is that IT departments actually love the no code story, because it's not opaque, they can shine a light on it. It's a ‘What is this thing doing?’”

Ultimately, despite surface-level impressions, citizen development is the antithesis of shadow IT. It’s bringing application development into the light.

If you want to find out more, I'd recommend PMI's new book, Citizen Developer: The Handbook for Creators and Change Makers (available at www.pmi.org/citizendeveloper).