How to empower citizen developers in a controlled environment

Niamh Lordan00:00

Hi everyone, and welcome to today's webinar, How to Empower Citizen Developers in a Controlled Environment. I'm Niamh Lordan, head of marketing here at FlowForma, and I'm the host today. Some housekeeping: this webinar is being recorded, and if you need any help, email info@flowforma.com. Your lines are muted, but please ask questions in the chat box or in the Q&A at the end. A short feedback survey will pop up afterward, and we'll share the recording tomorrow.

Niamh Lordan01:00

Today I'm joined by Paul Stone, our go-to product expert and a founding member of the company, so you're in really capable hands. Over the next 35 minutes or so, Paul will share some really interesting information about the rise of the citizen developer, and his best tips for tackling the increased demand for digitalization right now. Paul, over to you.

Paul Stone01:29

Some analysis has identified that two-thirds of people are finding, since COVID, that their processes are broken. Processes that depended on paper being passed between people have broken, because paper is no longer a suitable way to pass information between colleagues, and a lot of people are working from home. So digital transformation is very high on the agenda. Many digital transformation programs in the past moved slowly or failed to achieve their goals, and people are looking at why, and at what they can do to enable it. That's leading them to the concept of citizen developers.

Paul Stone02:44

People need more agility than ever to cope with all the changes COVID has brought about. Their goals are clear, but there's a lot to digitize, and that work can't be done by the IT department or IT suppliers alone. There simply isn't the time or the resources to digitize at the pace needed to maintain productivity and market position. So in 2020 you'll see the rise of the citizen developer: business people building automated solutions to their own business process problems, so they can keep achieving their business goals.

Paul Stone03:40

Does that mean IT aren't involved? Absolutely not. IT provide the infrastructure citizen developers work on, drive the technology standards, and provide the guardrails that let citizen developers build solutions without increasing the risk to the business.

Paul Stone04:03

There are a lot of approaches to citizen development, but we've found you need people in certain roles to guarantee success. First, business experts who understand the processes in the business today. The processes don't need to be documented in great detail; you just need the people who understand them and how the business goals are achieved. Second, an executive sponsor: a champion who promotes the citizen developer approach and pushes the organization to adopt the solutions. When a citizen developer builds a solution, the savings and productivity gains come from that solution being adopted. It's the adoption that's the key to generating the return on investment.

Paul Stone05:40

Third, somebody controlling the activity. If you gave a citizen developer tool to 100 people and said 'get going', you'd be exposing yourself to a lot of risk. You need a technology governor in place to govern the development of those solutions and act as a gatekeeper, making sure solutions are properly tested before they go into production.

Paul Stone06:11

There are other roles too. A change manager can help the executive sponsor promote solutions and encourage adoption. A center of excellence can include a process pro, who advises business experts on the best approach to a process, and a technology expert, who advises on technical issues such as integrating with a back-end system. A customer experience pro makes sure that when you expose digital solutions to customers and suppliers, the experience adds value to the relationship. And a governance, risk and compliance pro makes sure everything is compliant, for example with GDPR, and minimizes risk to the business.

Paul Stone08:00

The snowball has started rolling, and companies are trying to digitize at pace and at scale. To do that successfully, you have to build a process automation culture: promote the idea of citizen developers, give them the tools they need, find a champion to push the concept out to the business, and provide training. Citizen developers don't have a lot of time. They can't spend a week or two on a course; they need to be trained within a day and start building the following day, so you need a flexible training approach.

Paul Stone09:28

You also want to marry process improvement with process automation. You probably have a process improvement initiative documenting and reviewing your processes right now, and automation is the delivery mechanism for those improvements. And embrace IT governance: IT are the gatekeepers who make sure citizen developer solutions are up to standard, add value, and don't create more problems than they solve. That's what we'll demonstrate today: how FlowForma manages governance of citizen developer solutions.

Paul Stone10:16

FlowForma has built a governance solution into its application that lets IT manage the deployment of FlowForma throughout your organization. A technical person at the center installs FlowForma applications across the organization and manages the interaction between environments and their users. For example, you might deploy a sandbox for someone in finance to build out some finance processes, and when they're ready, they apply to IT to have those processes put into production, in a very automated way.

Paul Stone11:15

This lets business users test in their own sandbox without risking production environments or posing major risk to the business. Citizen developers build and test flows before applying to IT to put them into production. It mirrors the way IT professionals build solutions: build, test, and move into production once the tests pass.

Paul Stone12:08

First, a quick look at what FlowForma is. It's a tool designed for citizen developers to build solutions based on processes, because processes drive the business toward its goals. FlowForma installs inside your SharePoint environment. Here, an end user clicks a link to start an employee onboarding process. FlowForma uniquely links workflow, data and document management in one tool and one interface: the steps run along the top, and the data for the current step sits below.

Paul Stone13:22

Behind that is a no-code configuration tool called the Flow Designer, which lets citizen developers build solutions without much IT knowledge. A flow is a template for a process. It holds the steps, the data captured on each step, and business rules that carry out automatic actions, such as sending an email, looping the workflow back, or integrating with a back-end system.

Paul Stone14:16

End users run processes, fill out forms and complete tasks, while citizen developers configure those processes. But if you were using a single site, the very next process you run after pressing save would include your changes. That's good, because changes take effect immediately, and bad, because any mistake is immediately live. Ideally you want multiple environments, so you can edit and test processes without risk to the business and then move them into production. That's where governance comes in. It lets you create multiple environments in your organization and move processes between them.

Paul Stone15:40

Imagine you're in finance or procurement and want a sandbox to build some digital processes. You go to your governance page, which sits inside SharePoint, and open the environments hub, where you can request new environments and see the status of your current ones. Each environment is an independent FlowForma application in SharePoint. I request a new environment, call it 'finance test area', and pick the environment type, in this case a user acceptance testing area.

Paul Stone17:00

Then I set who should have access and in which role. An administrator can create process templates, or flows. A generic user just uses them. You might add yourself as an administrator and a test user as a generic user. When I press submit, the request goes to the governance administrator in IT, who assesses it and approves or rejects it.

Paul Stone17:54

Switching to the administrator's view, the request for the finance test area appears, submitted by the test user. I didn't give a rationale, so in real life IT would probably reject it, but for the demo I'll accept it. The system asks where to put the new application. I pick a site collection and create a brand-new site, and the system creates the site and installs FlowForma in it automatically. That takes a little while, so let's move on to process promotion.

Paul Stone19:44

Back as the finance user, I want to move a process I've been working on from my test area into production. In the processes hub, I request a process promotion. It asks where to move the process from and where to move it to. I pick a field change request from my construction build area and choose the construction production environment as the destination. When I press next, it creates a request with the status 'submitted'. My work is done, and it passes to IT.

Paul Stone20:58

As the IT administrator, I check the requests in the processes hub, and there's the field change request. I can accept it, or revert it, which sends it back to the requester with comments by email. I'll accept it, and it asks for my credentials. As an IT administrator you need a certain level of privileged access, because you're creating SharePoint sites, installing apps and moving information between site collections. This tool is designed for IT administrators to carry out that work. When I submit, it copies the field change request from the sandbox site into the production site.

Paul Stone23:26

Refreshing the screen, the field change request has been moved and the request is complete. In the construction production site, the field change request now appears in the list of processes, and when I start it, it's exactly the same as the process in the sandbox. We also have a separate webinar on our website that shows that process being built. I can add a tile for it to the home page in a few clicks.

Paul Stone24:56

That's how governance gives citizen developers their own area to create processes, independent of production, while IT administrators move those processes between environments at the click of a button. You can set up as many environments as you like, at whatever depth: sandbox then production, or sandbox, UAT and production. And you can manage who has access to each environment, so a team of testers could have access to the test environment, for example.

Paul Stone25:51

Governance has other functions too, many of them about adoption at scale. For example, IT can set default colors and a default logo for forms, then publish that theme to selected sites or every site in the tenancy, so all forms use the latest branding.

Paul Stone27:14

You can also manage user groups across every deployment. The most common use is removing someone who has left the company: you select all the sites, type in the username, and they're removed from every group. You can also remove someone from the administrator group everywhere, so they can no longer change flows, and you can add or replace users when people change roles or move divisions, without going into each site.

Paul Stone28:43

FlowForma is a no-code tool, but there are plenty of add-ons, often built for specific industries. The location question type is a good example, used widely in construction. A construction company could deploy it to every site in its tenancy, so it's always available in the flows people build, and update its training program to cover it.

Paul Stone30:07

The licensing hub lets you maintain licenses across your apps. You can disable an app without deleting its flows and workflows. You can also unlicense a user across the entire tenancy, which takes them out of action in every site and frees up their license for someone else. The feature list shows which features are enabled in your environment, and as you license more, they become available in every app you deploy.

Paul Stone32:13

Usage reporting shows the number of forms started and completed, steps completed and more. You can associate cost centers and departments with users, see usage broken down by each, vary the time frame, and export the data to Excel, which is very useful for cross-charging based on actual usage.

Niamh Lordan33:07

Paul, I'm going to put you on the spot with a few questions. Samantha is asking: can FlowForma Governance help to standardize processes across the business?

Paul Stone33:24

Absolutely. You can create a site containing standard processes you want to deploy to different departments, for example central admin processes defined by HR, and deploy them to sites across your tenancy. At the moment you transfer those processes one by one, but we're releasing a utility that will let you transfer and update them in bulk to your divisional or departmental sites. So yes, it supports the idea of process standardization.

Niamh Lordan34:19

The final question is from Daniel, and it's a really good one: how can he identify citizen developers within his business? Paul, do you have any tips?

Paul Stone34:31

It's a tricky one. Organizations that deploy FlowForma as a platform typically don't have that many citizen developers, because one citizen developer's work might be used by 100 people, and it's that adoption that gets the return. Most people don't have the time, and taking a day out of a business manager's routine is a significant commitment. So you need somebody who has the time and often a personal interest in succeeding. I always say that if a person can write a process down on paper so someone else can understand it, they know enough to digitize it. You don't need much technical knowledge.

Paul Stone35:57

Not every business user is comfortable with the idea of building an IT system, but we take them through a gentle training cycle. Our SureStart program hand-holds you through building your first process, and it converts everybody. So the best citizen developers have some aptitude and a personal interest, because it helps them achieve their goals faster or makes their team more productive. Don't be put off by the technology. The most important thing is understanding a process and being able to document it.

Niamh Lordan37:00

Great tips. We haven't got to everyone's question, but we'll come back to you with an answer as soon as possible. Thanks, everyone, for joining us today. If you'd like to hear more, go to flowforma.com and fill in the contact form, whether you'd like a trial, a one-to-one demo or a consultation. A short survey will pop up now, and I'd really appreciate a few minutes of your time. Thanks for joining, and thanks, Paul.