Challenges upon implementing Citizen Developer

[MeganDev]

Hello All,

We have recently started following and practicing Citizen Developer principles in our organization.

However, we are having challenges on how our scrum and stories are being assigned, and also impacting our bandwidth.

One issue that we have been facing is:

- We have a few team (not from ServiceNow background) who are not familiar with the entire platform, but they are creating catalog items using the catalog builder. Now they have questions regarding the different types of variables used, questions regarding catalog UI policies.

Our ServiceNow developers assist them with their questions.

However, when another team uses the catalog builder to create their catalog items, the same questions come up.

This is not only restricted to catalog builder, but other modules also.

I would like to know from other consultants, who have been following citizen development, as to how do they mitigate such challenges, and the practices they follow.

Any idea is welcomed.

@Chuck Tomasi @Paige Duffey @Dhruv Gupta1 @Ashutosh Munot1 @Jon G Lind @Anali Perez 

[Paige Duffey]

Hello!

So I think what you are missing is a well-oiled Support Model for your citizen developers. I'd look at addressing it in two ways:
1. Establish some kind of Office Hours with a regular cadence for those individuals to come to ask questions, and start driving them towards those sessions. You can even record, index and store these sessions in KB articles to refer people back to when they have similar questions

2. Create a Communication channel including *all* of your citizen developers. Usually, this is just a channel in teams or slack or whatever your company already uses for team communication. You may find that initially your SN Dev team are still answering a lot of the questions, but your citizen developers will also start answering one another's questions. 

3. Create and maintain a knowledge base. If you have frequently asked questions, it may be worth creating a KB article to answer those questions. 

There's some more in depth info on those topics here: Citizen Developer-Establish a Support Model 

In practice, I've done all three of these things and they really helped to take some of the pressure off my SN Dev team. But we did have to push back sometimes to force the citizen developers into waiting for Office Hours or searching the Knowledge Base.