How citizen developers accelerate their organization's digital transformation?

Digital transformation, which involves leveraging new digital capabilities to reshape organizations, is a crucial endeavor in today's business landscape. For example, consider a small consulting firm that used to rely solely on in-person meetings and printed documents. Embracing digital transformation, the company adopted online collaborative tools, such as video conferencing and cloud document sharing. This allowed them to expand their services to clients in different regions, reduce travel costs, and enhance efficiency by instantly and securely sharing information. This example illustrates how digital transformation can drive growth and adaptability for businesses. Project professionals find themselves in a privileged position for growth, sought after for their ability to navigate complexity and drive successful transformations.

As change becomes constant, #ProjectManagers are increasingly responsible for handling change complexities, overcoming resistance, shaping organizational behavior, and employing systems thinking to align projects with broader strategic objectives. To meet the demands of this ever-evolving landscape, Project Management Institute has expanded its offerings, providing project professionals with a variety of skills and capabilities needed to thrive in the era of digital transformation, and organizations are starting to see Citizen Developers as a key role for digital transformation.

The role of citizen developers in digital transformation

A Citizen Developer is someone who can build applications without coding knowledge but occasionally receives support from IT. They are individuals who tend to be experts in business processes or tasks throughout the organization. They could be sales executives who feel they could have a better customer relationship if their tools were more accessible, or back-office employees who want to reduce the number of manual steps between employees in a certain process. Thus, Citizen Developers tend to be change agents, demonstrating the value of a proposal in an agile and practical way, using low-code/no-code (LCNC) tools as platforms for this development.

Benefits of Citizen Developers

Citizen development is a cost-effective approach for organizations to drive innovation and address inefficiencies. It allows more people within the organization to contribute significantly to creating new products and services, reducing dependence on the IT team and freeing up their capacity for strategic initiatives. Citizen development works in conjunction with other change initiatives and centralizes efforts, reducing risks and increasing visibility. It empowers business users to find and create solutions while enabling IT to act as a facilitator and supporter. Applications developed with low-code/no-code platforms are easy to maintain, expand, and duplicate, offering flexibility and efficiency.

Low-code/no-code application platforms provide simple methods to track all applications built within the organization, minimizing duplication and encouraging collaboration and sharing. Citizen development empowers people to make quick changes to their applications, improving their work and better meeting customer needs. With modern LCNC platforms, anyone can create intuitive applications, turning ideas into reality without the need for programming knowledge or previous software development experience.

Challenges and Overcoming Them

Being a disruptive technology, Citizen Development comes with various risks, which can lead many organizations to not adopt it as a practice unless they identify quick wins quickly. The main challenge lies not in technology or technical knowledge but in effectively managing the change with all stakeholders deeply rooted in the operation.

Within the operation, IT is directly involved, where CIOs and IT functions play a crucial role in protecting the organization against business risks while managing IT architecture and strategy. However, many CIOs deal with legacy systems and spend a significant amount of time on routine operations and maintenance. Introducing Citizen Development can be perceived as an additional risk. Moreover, command and control structures and lack of clarity in responsibilities affect the potential of Citizen Development. It is necessary to decentralize decision-making and enable greater capacity for innovation.

To mitigate these risks and provide guidance, PMI offers the Citizen Development Canvas framework, which addresses the five key components that enable organizations to create, operate, and scale Citizen Development across the organization. These five components are:

• Project delivery: How to achieve the necessary speed to deliver results, conceptualize new proposals, and correctly assess what needs to be done?
• Development capability: How do our actions align with the problem at hand, what are the potential risks, and how to develop such a solution?
• Operational model: Vision of the objective and final state of the effort and the support that Citizen Developers will have to perform this work.
• Organizational alignment: Analysis of how change management, culture, transparency, governance, metrics, and values influence results.
• CD maturity model: Through five stages of maturity, the goal is to reach the last stage of Innovation, where the organization has self-organized groups seeking innovation opportunities autonomously.

Culture of Innovation and Collaboration

The culture of innovation and collaboration plays a fundamental role in the success of citizen developers and the digital transformation of the organization. Creating a culture that encourages innovation, the company must foster an open and receptive environment where new ideas are valued and encouraged. This is where the concept of "shadow IT" can be addressed, as the existence of this phenomenon may be influenced by the organizational culture.

Organizational culture can be described as being created from solutions developed by individuals to address a problem at a specific moment, whether or not they follow best practices. Once successful, these solutions can be disseminated throughout the company over time, shaping the perception of shadow IT. If the culture prioritizes centralized control and distrusts the capabilities of individuals, the tendency for shadow IT to emerge may be greater. On the other hand, a culture that values innovation, collaboration, and continuous learning can encourage individuals to seek solutions within established processes, promoting better performance and contributing to digital transformation.

Awareness of organizational culture is essential for citizens to understand the role they play in the company's digital transformation. By aligning their efforts with organizational principles, values, and beliefs, citizen developers can be effective agents of change, avoiding uncontrolled development of shadow IT and directing their efforts towards improving internal processes.

In this context, promoting collaboration among citizen developers and other professionals in the organization becomes even more relevant. Collaboration allows citizens to understand the needs of various areas of the company and develop solutions that meet the specific demands of each department. By working together, citizens can connect their ideas to the organization's mission and vision, aligning with shared principles and values.

Success Stories

Several companies, with the intention of delivering value quickly and visualizing results, have already adopted Citizen Development practices and low-code/no-code (LCNC) platforms. Ford, a pioneer at various times in history, used LCNC platforms to solve communication problems with all employees by creating an intranet accessible to all staff. P&G, in one of their cases, was able to build an app for inventory accounting and management, eliminating manual paper-based processes and resulting in significant savings. Globo, on the other hand, has several initiatives in this area, such as apps that onboard new employees to specific areas and processes. For those who are interested, the #PMI website provides real-life examples and case studies on Citizen Development, which can be accessed here.

Citizen Development has proven to be a powerful strategy for accelerating digital transformation and driving business growth. The success stories of Ford, P&G, Globo, and many other organizations demonstrate how this approach enables the rapid delivery of value, eliminating manual processes, and generating significant cost savings. By adopting Citizen Development practices and LCNC platforms, these companies are reaping the benefits of agility, efficiency, and innovation. It is inspiring to see how Citizen Development is revolutionizing the way companies create digital solutions, empowering employees to be agents of change and driving business success. We invite everyone to explore the opportunities offered by #CitizenDevelopment and discover the transformative potential of this approach for their organizations.

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?References

Real Life Citizen Development Series

PMI Citizen Development Body of Knowledge CDBoK