Building applications with post-its

As a co-creative workshop facilitator, design thinker and huge fan of post-its (also digital ones), I was intrigued by the tagline of Appergine, "building applications with post-its". Earlier this month I was introduced to Lex van Sonderen, CEO of Appergine. Lex developed an approach for process definition and application development with its roots in Event Storming and Design Thinking. This approach however is taking these methodologies to the next level by making the connection to the actual application development. It is called ‘Appstorming’. He showed me the approach using the quote2cash process and asked me to share my feedback as a LinkedIn post.

What immediately resonated to me was the approach being used as a means of communication between the different stakeholders and the application engineer. It starts with collaboratively drawing down the process using post-its which has, to my opinion, a couple of big advantages:

• The process is directly documented and described in the language of the user reducing the risk of misunderstandings caused by jargon.
• The process becomes transparent resulting in a common understanding of the process and potential inefficiencies
• The interaction among stakeholders will result in building a mutual understanding of needs and pain points. Management understands what users need and users understand what management drives
• Within one work session you can make the ‘functional design’ final avoiding having to go into the organisation for reviews and approvals (when all relevant stakeholders are in the room off course). This speeds up the process as you will not lose time chasing people.

In the refinement phase the application elements are added i.e. how is the application going to execute the documented process step, what input is required and what output needs to be generated. This information is added on post-its as well which results in a technical design. This layer allows the engineer to generate the code for the application. I can imagine some post-processing will be required, especially with heavy customization.

The big win for me is bringing the user very close to the application development (the user does not need to code though) allowing communication problems and change requests being solved on-the-spot without starting a paper exercise. The investment in time and efforts is limited between the first workshop and the first version of the application and the tooling takes away a lot of overhead. Learn fast and early is today’s trend and Appstorming allows an additional acceleration as going from zero to testing a working prototype goes super-fast.

I am curious though how easy it will be to make adjustments while moving through several iterations, especially when adjustments get more complex due to process inter dependencies or when integration with other applications, processes or people is required. This will be part of Appergine’s evolution so time will tell.