How do you turn your entire business into an engine for digital transformation? For Jabil, a leading global manufacturing solutions provider, the answer is citizen development. Following the launch of Jabil’s ServiceNow Center of Excellence (CoE), the company onboarded 32 citizen developers. These developers automated 12 new workflows in eight months, saving Jabil more than 4,500 hours of manual work. And that momentum continues to grow—citizen development has tripled the company’s ServiceNow development capacity and given Jabil’s business functions control over their own digital destiny.
Citizen development is an effective way to scale ServiceNow innovation, maximizing the value of the Now Platform® by accelerating implementation and adoption. It increases your pool of skilled ServiceNow resources, and it also lets business functions solve their own problems by applying their unique business knowledge. However, citizen development also has its challenges. How do you get the business engaged in the first place? And how do you loosen the reins without racking up technical debt?
Here’s how Jabil did it. The company’s five-step approach has delivered stellar results, which is why I’m so fired up about sharing it with you today.
- Highlight the outcomes that business functions can realize
To get support and investment from business partners, Jabil’s ServiceNow CoE starts by answering the question, “What’s in it for me?” They highlight how citizen development can support the partner’s ongoing transformation needs by automating processes quickly and repeatably. The ability to self-serve is also a big selling point—the business partner isn’t limited by the CoE’s development capacity. Ande Johnson, Senior IT Director at Jabil, puts it this way, “We simply went to leaders and said, ‘This will help you move fast and build skills to self-serve. Are you interested?’ And they all said yes.” - Establish citizen developer commitments
Of course, enthusiasm needs to be backed up by commitment. That’s why Jabil makes sure that everyone involved signs up to do their part. Business partners must fund training and certification of citizen developers and follow the CoE’s citizen development processes. The CoE commits to provide coaching, expert guidance and support, and clear citizen development guardrails. Individual citizen developers need to grow and maintain their ServiceNow skills—including maintaining certifications—and meet or exceed established development standards. They also have to actively participate in Jabil’s ServiceNow community and support and coach new citizen developers. - Ensure citizen developers can own the solutions they create
Jabil citizen development processes give citizen developers end-to-end ownership of the solutions they develop. Citizen developers can pick the solutions they own from their business function’s solution backlog based on their area of interest and level of expertise. They are also responsible testing, deploying, maintaining, and upgrading their solutions. The CoE supports citizen developers by reviewing and approving solutions before work begins, giving them expert help when needed, and carrying out in-depth code reviews prior to deployment to ensure solution quality. - Build a ServiceNow community of practice
Jabil has created and nurtured a community of practice. This supports citizen developers’ success and helps to evangelize ServiceNow across the business. The community is built on three key pillars: building skills, coaching, and celebration. Based on their certifications and ServiceNow badges, developers can get special platform access privileges so they can gain additional expertise and experience. The CoE hosts a weekly meeting where citizen developers get coaching from experts and experienced peers, and it maintains a community forum for 24/7 support. The CoE also celebrates individual accomplishments—such as most certifications or most solutions developed – using a leaderboard that it shares online and at community meetings. - Define metrics to measure success
Jabil has created measurable goals to track and improve the success of its citizen development program. The KPIs it tracks support three key business objectives: accelerating business transformation, ensuring development quality, and scaling the citizen development community. For example, it tracks the number of workflows automated and the number of enhancements made to support business transformation. Development quality is tracked through the number of code reviews done and the first-time pass rate (currently at an impressive 90%). Finally, it tracks the number of certifications completed and in progress, as well as the average tenure of its citizen developers, to ensure its citizen development program continues to scale.
I think you’ll agree that Jabil’s approach has delivered impressive results, and I hope that Jabil has given you some ideas on how to kickstart your own successful citizen development program.
Until next time!
Jabil is a global manufacturing solutions provider with more than 200,000 people in 100 sites strategically located around the world. The company combines unmatched end-market experience, technical and design capabilities, manufacturing know-how, supply chain insights, and global product management expertise to deliver success for the world’s leading brands.
