Build your pilot
Start training your citizen developers. Teach them the rules and tools in a governed environment.
Start with a proof of concept
Training and education
Implement your plans for training as part of your pilot. Ensure the right roles are assigned and that IT admins curate the content. Determine how you will scale support.
Where to build
Apps that your organization will use should be developed in your org’s developer instance to allow for proper testing and secure deployment.
Pick your pilot
Select your pilot carefully. Improving workflows and efficiency can come from automating: simple forms, task management, repeatable processes, Excel spreadsheets, and more.
Start with a proof of concept
Training and education
Implement your plans for training as part of your pilot. Ensure the right roles are assigned and that IT admins curate the content. Determine how you will scale support.
Where to build
Apps that your organization will use should be developed in your org’s developer instance to allow for proper testing and secure deployment.
Pick your pilot
Select your pilot carefully. Improving workflows and efficiency can come from automating: simple forms, task management, repeatable processes, Excel spreadsheets, and more.
Invest in your citizen developers
Train your citizen developers in best practices and ServiceNow capabilities while you provide ongoing guidance. Promote standardized development guidelines to ensure consistency within your citizen developer community and as you begin your pilot.
Get your citizen developers comfortable with the technology. Your Now Platform® education offerings should include:
- Orientation
- Capabilities overview
- Application development instructions
- Using a personal development instance
- Hands-on training and support
- Guidelines and policies
- Process, support, and approvals
Record training sessions and make them available on-demand. Provide materials and documentation along with ServiceNow training content to help ready your citizen developers to build their first app on your developer portal.
Test ideation and your demand intake process as part of your pilot. With roles and responsibilities already defined, your teams should focus on key objectives, including:
- Evaluating ideas and demand
- Weighing ideas against business priorities
- Business cases
- Technical feasibility
- Potential costs
- Cross-functional synergies
- Controlled opening of the Now Platform to the business
Ideas are best managed via a portal where citizen developers can submit their app suggestions for evaluation and approval. The portal will collect the right level of information to ensure alignment with:
- Business needs
- Technical feasibility
- Data requirements
- Demand management
ServiceNow offers a customizable app intake catalog as part of our App Engine Studio offering.
Activate the tools your citizen developers will need. This means providing access to all the tools, data, policies, and processes it will take to create an app. Ensure security and access control according to your company policies.
Toolset reviews and orientation have already happened as part of your early education. Your citizen developers may work within one or more of the following developer tools:
- App Engine Studio
- Integration Hub
- UI Builder
- Process Automation Designer
- Automated Testing Framework
- Source Control
- Flow Designer
Provide citizen developers with templates from App Engine Studio to help them start building their app quickly. Offer a library of performance and value KPIs that can be used to demonstrate the value of the app to the business.
As your pilot project begins, IT admins and your program owner should implement multi-channel support opportunities. Build a citizen developer community within Yammer, Slack, Teams, or the internal communications tool of your choice. This gives your IT admins and citizen developers a place to engage regularly and communicate easily regardless of physical location. It also allows for questions and content to be searchable so citizen developers can self-serve and find answers to frequently asked questions that were already answered.
Offering IT admin “office hours” is a good way to dedicate time to support your citizen developers. Providing one or two dedicated hours a week provides a:
- Forum to ask more detailed questions
- Means to get answers quickly
- Focus time for IT with fewer ad-hoc requests
- Source of content to create self-help docs
Engaged and supported citizen developers will gain confidence in their abilities as they learn and ensure a more successful pilot and program.
Pilot the best use case
Select the use case that best aligns with the criteria set in your planning process.
PILOT
Governing your pilot
As with any application, use the same best practices, policies and standards to develop your pilot.
No code, no problem
Medtronic created a citizen development program to increase app dev capacity and speed digital transformation.
Excel at excellence
Improve velocity and manage risk with a ServiceNow Center of Excellence and Innovation (CoEI).
Resources
Talk with an expert
Success starts here. Build your citizen development program with help from ServiceNow.