How citizen development can improve productivity, brand operation

In 2011, American entrepreneur and investor, Marc Andreessen, published a now-famous piece, where he remarked that ‘software is eating the world’. This was his way of pointing out how small-scale startups and small businesses leveraging technological advancements could gain an advantage over larger corporations, especially, within very short periods.

A decade later, this statement has proven true on different metrics and continues to explain the rapid economic growth of today’s startups.

Many years ago, startups cost a lot to run due to the heavy prices founders and their teams were required to pay for tools that are considered basic today. Cloud computing reduced server costs, software development tools became more affordable and other factors ensured that building and scaling a tech business got increasingly easier.

One of such additional factors is how commonplace agile development has become and how it has helped businesses reduce risks while staying as flexible as possible to satisfy their customers.

Teams who have long embraced this project management structure have had a major advantage, considering the opportunity it presents for them to iterate, gain insights from their customers and improve their products promptly without losing the users’ interest or patronage.

While this ability to fix, add or remove features always gains buy-in from users due to the superior experience it delivers, it also implies a certain level of software engineering expertise that many startups might find hard to adapt to or learn.

In the US, for instance, there were an estimated 1.4 million unfilled computer science jobs at the end of 2020 due to a shortage of technical talents, mostly software developers.

What this demand and supply challenge has led to is a steep rise in the cost of hiring the few available talents without an assurance of loyalty.

Unfortunately, this challenge is not unique to US companies or startups across other continents, leading to companies favouring the establishment of talent pipelines. Notwithstanding, the daunting task of pushing many aspiring developers beyond the intimidation of coding remains a hurdle many have not surmounted, hence the continued talent shortage.

The Project Management Institute (PMI) is taking a slightly different but more effective approach to tackle this talent challenge and many other challenges that have emerged from an over-reliance on IT. As a leading association for project professionals and changemakers (86 per cent of whom face this challenge of too few software developers to aid digital transformation at their businesses), PMI is championing the adoption of low-code and no-code platforms within teams to make up for the technical talent shortfall.

Already, Gartner, the world’s leading research and advisory company, predicts that low-code and no-code development will be responsible for more than 65 per cent of application-development activity by 2024.

The company also estimates that the number of active citizen developers will be four times that of professional developers by 2023. PMI’s latest move provides a clear answer to how and why it is important.

Recently, the Project Management Institute launched the PMI Citizen Development Platform, which offers a suite of educational resources and a set of global industry standards, best practices, methodologies, and governance for organisations seeking to implement and scale citizen development practices.

On PMI’s Citizen Developer platform, resources are provided to introduce newbies to the mechanics and provide in-depth training on best practices, while offering an ecosystem of vendors and delivery organisations to companies under the Partner Programme.

Sam Sibley, who is the Global Head of the PMI Citizen Developer program, provides a clear insight into how businesses can benefit from the program, referencing the value it unlocks for them to become hyper agile.

He says: “Organisations can take an idea, design, build, test and deploy applications in a matter of days or weeks instead of months or years, thereby delivering new products to market faster, and capitalising on new revenue streams.”

Beyond the rapid delivery, which the citizen developer programme will help companies achieve, the cost savings on new talent hire is yet another reason why companies should be queuing up to join. If companies can train entire departments to build the tools their customers need, this automatically reduces the burden on most engineering departments and the constant need to expand them as the company scales.

For non-technical talents, on the other hand, the platform offers more than just an additional skill that saves companies some money. Skill standardisation is a huge challenge for many human resource units in this era of self-learning, and PMI’s training certification provides some headway to how hiring managers might be able to search and find people with citizen development skills.

Even more encouraging is the fact that PMI’s pedigree and trust built over the last 52 years with their clients and members would most likely be transferred when such organisations go in search of no-code talents, making their ecosystem of citizen developers a sweet spot to be in.

This ecosystem benefit extends to PMI vendors who sooner than later will become the gold standard for companies looking to get the best no-code frameworks and tools that can aid their strategic transformation processes, moving them from their sole reliance on IT personnel to build software to a more participatory style.