Citizen Development at scale

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In partnership with a major petroleum company, our team evaluated the business strategy, assessed the current business challenges, and developed a Digital Transformation strategy. A key element of that Digital Transformation strategy was supporting the technical staff (engineers, geoscientists, and data analysts) to make high quality decisions faster and more efficiently.

Citizen development was identified as a key enabler to support the technical staff. Citizen development removes traditional IT organizations from the critical path of simple digital solutions and allows those closest to the work and processes to develop their own applications in a sustainable solution to achieve high quality, lasting results. 

We defined, designed, and executed the 5 key elements of the citizen development program:

• Toolkit: Adopting the right toolkit to address the broadest challenges with the fewest solutions while maintaining simplicity to minimize the barriers to adoption. Microsoft Power Platform complimented with a few key applications was adopted as the toolkit of choice supporting the change management strategy to achieve rapid, mass adoption
• Capability: We sought to quickly establish working knowledge of low code programming, analytics, business intelligence, and data engineering in the technical teams. We designed a training program to help rapidly create familiarity with short introductory courses while providing the resources for self-learning to match their interests and needs
• Coaching: As the citizen developers began building their own applications, we accelerated their learning and delivery through a formal coaching program, minimizing the demand on IT while delivering exceptional outcomes at velocity
• Governance: We established governance to provide the right guard rails and stewardship for each application throughout its lifecycle enabling the flexibility and velocity the teams required while maintaining cybersecurity and operability 
• Change: Our change management philosophy is to incrementally deliver change in a supportive and helpful way thus creating an organizational pull for change instead of a resistance to change. This was woven into every aspect of the program design  —  from the naming of the toolkit to the training engagements to the governance. 

Our execution exceeded volume, velocity, and value targets. We trained over 40 teams and those teams delivered over 25 applications in 4 months driving waste from day to day activities and creating efficient and measurable business processes. While citizen development is one of many pieces of a successful Digital Transformation design, it is often a foundational element establishing the right skills, data integrity, and analytics with high scalability enabling and accelerating many elements of Digital Transformation.