Take a Change On Me: How Change Management Empowers the Implementation of Citizen Development
Citizen development has become indispensable in many companies and in many different industries these days. According to Gartner, by 2024, 80% of technology products and services will be built by those who are not technology professionals.?
Gartner describes a citizen developer as follows: ‘’A citizen developer is an employee who creates application capabilities for consumption by themselves or others, using tools that are not actively forbidden by IT or business units. A citizen developer is a persona, not a title or targeted role. They report to a business unit or function other than IT’’.?
Key benefits of citizen development?
Low-code/no-code platforms empower citizen developers to improve business processes safely. An organization with a good citizen development program has happier employees and more efficient operations, enabling the IT team to focus on more critical projects. Down below you can find some key reasons why organizations are investing in citizen development:
Organizations are always looking for the simplest way to handle both simple and complex processes. Citizen development helps to streamline these processes, brings fluidity to the workplace, and builds strong communication across all departments.?
Markets, technology, and wishes and needs are constantly changing. This is the reason why organizations lookout for a roadmap to release products and services quickly. Citizen development can help a company to speed up product development and enhance better service delivery.
Thanks to citizen development, application development doesn’t take months anymore. Now non-IT employees can build enterprise-grade apps easily, using drag-and-drop interfaces, without bottlenecks. Citizen developers can help a company to adapt quickly to overcome challenges or meet new demands.
Citizen developers can align the business and IT without any doubt. How? With the right no-code low-code platform. With the right platform, citizen developers can build applications without relying on IT. This way, the IT backlogs are greatly reduced, and costs are optimized, boosting the organization’s overall productivity.?
More businesses are leveraging their non-technical workforce and upskilling them to minimize the load on IT. With the right tools, citizen developers can develop essential business apps faster, eliminate bottlenecks, and improve process efficiency.
It’s important to understand that implementing citizen development brings a lot of benefits for your organization, but it also brings a lot of changes. Those changes have an impact on almost every process in your organization. Therefore, good change management is very important.?
How to empower citizen development deployment with change management
Before I’m going to tell you how good change management empowers the deployment of citizen development in your organization, it’s important to know what change management is.?
Gartner describes change management as follows: ‘’Change management is the automated support for development, rollout and maintenance of system components (i.e., intelligent regeneration, package versioning, state control, library control, configuration management, turnover management, and distributed impact sensitivity reporting)’’.?
So how can you harness the power of your team, obtain high levels of engagement and adoption, and get true business value? Here are the top 5 change management best practices!
Both the business and IT sides of your company need to know that citizen development is a priority, important, and that you support their effort. People also should understand your IT organization is behind them, and you or IT won’t brand their efforts as “going rogue.”
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2. Be clear about your goals
Why are you deploying citizen development? What do you want to get from it? How does it align with your business strategy and goals?
When you provide your organization with these answers, it makes it easier to communicate your purpose to your team in a way that engages both hearts and minds. It also informs your metrics strategy and ensures the application of the tools aligns with your purpose.
3. Clear and effective communication
It’s important to use both formal and informal communication channels to prepare your organization and inform them. Ask yourself the question why is citizen development important? Why should people care? How will they be involved? And where can they get help? Don’t underestimate the importance of open and honest communication!?
4. Train your teams
Take the time to educate your team on the tools and how to use them. Show your teams two different ways of the implementation process: show them what is possible and show them how to use the tools. The last one seems obvious but is very important. You cannot simply roll citizen development out and expect it to work. Users must understand how to use the tools and where the boundaries lie. Your training should escalate as knowledge increases.
5. Use broad metrics to measure your outcomes.
Metrics should include utilization (are people using the tools?), proficiency (are they mastering their application?), and business impact (are you achieving your goals?).
Good metrics allow you to measure true value and provide important examples in your ongoing communications campaign so you can continue building momentum.
How legal departments determine how much change management a new tool needs
As the tech evolution something else other than grab - ‘As tech evolves’ could work complete organizations as well as legal departments, the need for a change-management roadmap or specific adoption strategies has become more vital than ever. There might be obvious primary ways a legal department sorts through tools, budgetary concerns, and type of technology solution. But beyond that are some secondary criteria that signal how easy or difficult the adoption of a tool might be.
The first of the criteria mentioned above is the need for customization of the tool. A software solution that provides a base product that can be customized to the needs of the end-user is likely to be more easily adopted than ones that are not. Having access to a tool that can be modified for the unique needs of each team can make its adoption much easier by offering more autonomy to team leaders.
The second criterion is the simplicity of the user interface. For a quick adoption in your department, ask yourself the following questions: Does the interface look clean and simple? Is the workflow of the end-user represented on each of the screens? Are the screens or app interface easy to understand and follow, and build trust with the end-user? If you can answer all those questions with a yes, it is a good sign that a tool will not require an extensive amount of training to be adopted.
The third criterion is prior familiarity with similar tools. When selecting a solution to most quickly absorb into a legal department’s workflow, opting for a tool that is more similar to a tool the team has previously used can be a good path to follow. If you choose to use a similar tool, the need for training goes down. Not only is the team already familiar with the processes that go into operating a new tool, but may also be able to recall strategies from the adoption of the initial tool.?
The fourth and last criterion is the tools’ impact on decision-making. When adopting analytic tools that are meant to offer the team data about internal processes, a good indicator of how long the change-management and training for the solution will take is the intended use of the data.?
Wrapping up
Implementing citizen development can bring your organization a lot of benefits. But to empower the deployment of citizen development it’s important to understand the importance of good change management. Change management that is filled in in the right way ensures that citizen development can be adopted more quickly.?
But not every tool needs the same amount of change management. It’s key to see the signals of how easy or difficult the implementation of a new tool might be. As mentioned in the previous episode of Citizen Development now, the (legal) tech movement should not be about centralizing power and maximizing profits for the traditional (legal) industry. It should be about making legal work better, faster, and easier in order to serve the end-user.?
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