Citizen Development-Establish a Support Model

[Paige Duffey]

Supporting the Citizen Developers​

Once the citizen developers have started working on the Platform, it is important that they are continuously supported by the core team. Here are some practices that have been identified as helpful.​

Citizen developers will require varying degrees of support as they start building the application; it is important that a support model is put in place that is scalable, not overly burdensome to the core team, and meets the needs of the citizen developers. ​

Communication channels​

Best practices include the establishment of a community of practice, office hours, and self-service capabilities. Consider taking advantage of dedicated developer channels such as MS Teams, Slack, etc. where the citizen developers can ask questions and interact with professional developers on the core ServiceNow development team. It is recommended that you provide at least a lite SLA (service level agreements) for responding to citizen developer questions. ​

Over time, the citizen developers will begin to support each other in addition to getting support from the core team. The collaboration tools you choose need to be easily searchable to see if any question has previously been asked or answered. ​

Citizen developer forums​

In addition, you should establish office hours during which you can hold 60- to 90-minute forums where citizen developers can ask questions from members of the core team, these can typically be recurring meetings held once or twice a week. ​

Office hours should be recorded; recordings made indexable and accessible to the community. Indexing can be as simple as timestamps detailing what question was asked and the answer is given, etc. For example, in the recording, at the timestamp 15 minutes and 40 seconds, the Flow Designer best practices were discussed.​

Consider mandating citizen developer attendance for a certain percentage of office hours, particularly at the beginning of the citizen developer program; it is strongly encouraged that citizen developers stay engaged within the community. Regardless of it being mandated, attendance should be tracked.​

Knowledge base​

It’s also important to establish a curated knowledge base of articles and information for the citizen developers. This can be done using ServiceNow’s knowledge capability. ​

The curation of this information by your organization is important as the citizen developer can be directed to information that’s appropriate to the products and the release of ServiceNow as well as to company-specific and organization-specific policies.​

Center of Excellence Navigation

Citizen Development - Center of Excellence

1. Vision and Plan
   1. Themes of a Successful Citizen Development Program
   2. Define a Clear Value Proposition
   3. Understand the Foundational Elements
2. Focus the Program
   1. Identify the Right Use Cases
   2. Recruit the Citizen Developers
3. Enable and Empower
   1. Train the Citizen Developers
   2. Establish a Support Model
4. Establish Guardrails
   1. Define the Application Lifecycle
   2. Automate the Development Process

[Aditi6]

How to set up office hours ?