Power Apps Viking

Building Communities and enabling Citizen Developers

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Søren Lauszus Weber – The Power Apps Viking

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I sometimes have the great pleasure of doing Power Platform training for new users. This can be colleagues as well as super-users working with enterprise companies or partner companies. It never ceases to surprise me how incredibly easy it is to get started with the Power Platform, but also how overwhelming it can be to move from the first basic steps to solving only slightly more complex challenges.

Solving the challenge of enabling the Citizen developer is key to ensure that companies see a return on investment on their investment in the Power Platform.

Switching on the Power Platform in an enterprise context

Many professionals working in the ISV space have made the switch to the Power Platform in recent years. This is a great step in the right direction and many companies are also reaping the benefits of this in several areas.

The recent, and often quoted, Forrester Total Economic Impact study highlights the many clear financial benefits, and also implicitly points to lowering development & configuration time. For consulting companies this gives consultants better tools to help enable companies to focus on their core business. For the companies themselves, this allows them to access tools quickly and with lower development costs, while empowering individuals within the company so they can develop or co-develop new tools that improve their day-to-day operations. This is of course not free, as enterprise companies need to account for not only the price of licenses, but also in supporting the new platform. On top of this there is usually also reliance on external vendors for providing services on the platform.

While there is even greater potential for both ISVs and enterprise companies adopting the Power Platform, there are some remaining obstacles that prevent companies from being able to fully reach the potential benefits.

The term Citizen Developer has for the past several years been touted as a key component of the Power Platform strategy, and while this is clear for ISV and consulting companies, the end goal – truly allowing potentially all enterprise employees to become citizen developers and apply the Power Platform tools – can seem out of reach.

How do citizen developers start on their journey? And how are they supported?

For Microsoft products there are generally two types of support to be found. The first is the official support, and in this regard, Microsoft offers a plethora of resources on its own blog dedicated to all things Power Platform. The second is the community: Microsoft has always relied on having an active support community for its products. This community is also starting to offer a vast amount of resources on LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube. As for accessing information online, in my previous blog post about finding Power Platform help online, I covered some common challenges facing new user’s when doing just that. There is of course also a third option, which is the one I often encounter. That is when companies outsource the problem-solving to ISVs or consulting companies. Even though this puts food on the table for me and my colleagues, it also pains me in some cases, as the platform is supposed to empower all users to create and enhance the Power Apps, and, in the process, reduce development costs and reliance on external resources such as myself. Yet, we still get daily calls and e-mails from people who need our help. This motivated me to write this, to further aid people in becoming citizen developers and support the push towards companies adopting the Power Platform.

I see two current trends moving forward in supporting the Power Platform roll-out. One is the further development of the citizen developer, the second is the increased focus on having internal resources who support the Power Platform roll-out within the enterprise company.
My focus is on the first group, and supporting this trend. The second trend is something that I believe comes naturally as more companies buy into the Power Platform.

Looking at the LinkedIn, Twitter feeds and blog posts from Microsoft business application MVPs and other professionals, the community has clearly recognized the need for information and guides. In my view, the community has two main target groups, the first is other professionals, the MVPs, and consultants that already work with the tools daily. However there is a much larger, and rapidly increasing last group. These are the users with little or no experience, such as super users or other types of internal company resources. There are very few resources available targeted specifically at them. I would argue that this last group is truly the real citizen developers, as the rest of us are, in several cases, actual professional developers.

Ensuring return on investment

In the beginning, I mentioned how many companies are investing in the Power Platform. Currently, many more are buying into it as well. We shouldn’t forget that this also means that someone made the decision to do so, and at some point, they will want to see the return. So now that someone is on the hook for those licenses, we should make sure to support those key stakeholders and the department or team around them.

Building the community

As is the case for anyone that has been in the community for several years, I could name many amazing individuals that other industry professionals follow closely to know what the newest features are, or which niche areas of the platform we have yet to discover. Among any business application professionals or Microsoft MVPs there is instant recognition of the name and their accolades, but how does this look for new users?
New users need easy access to guides and tools to quickly solve their problems and get back to focusing on their daily tasks. Every day users do not have unlimited time to search for blog posts and hour-long YouTube videos to find the answer to a simple question. If the material is not available, they will resort to the alternative of using tools they already know already, Excel, SharePoint, etc.

I would love to get feedback from all types of users in the community on the points raised. Am I missing some key elements? Are we doing exactly what is needed and it just takes time to build naturally, or do we need to do more?

I think the space for low-code development platforms is at a crucial point and we need to be vigilant about pooling our resources to ensure user adoption to bring in the era of the citizen developer.

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