Out The Box Citizen Developer Solutions Able To Unlock Efficiency And Productivity

As the world around us has changed so dramatically over the last couple of years ranging from pandemic to supply chain shortages to cost of living crisis, the pressures faced by individuals has been played out in organisations across the globe. These pressures have meant that companies have had to put real, targeted focus on the bottom line and specifically on robust cost control. There is however another route of attack and many organisations have been forced to have a good hard look at it…. productivity and efficiency. Are we as productive and efficient as we could be?

As a practitioner and firm believer in process control and continuous improvement being the critical paths to ensure we maximise productivity and efficiency and in so doing drive out waste in our organisations while minimise non-value adding activities and maximising value, there have been years searching for that silver bullet to solve all issues. Ok, I may not have found the silver bullet, but I think we have become aware of and started to scratch the surface of something that could make the world of difference.

Citizen development of out of the box systems and solutions available to all organisations is a truly exciting prospect. A citizen developer is suggested by Gartner glossary as “… an employee who creates application capabilities for consumption by themselves or others, using tools that are not actively forbidden by IT or business units. A citizen developer is a persona, not a title or targeted role. They report to a business unit or function other than IT.”.

My definition is less precise and a lot simpler, since I am referring here to how we have developed a supply chain admin department through self-learning with tools such as LinkedIn learning to maximise this very approach. Our starting point is with MS Teams, which garnered increasing fame during the pandemic and lockdowns, but which had been around for some time. In fact, in our environment, we had begun developing our supply chain management processes through MS teams close to 1 year before anyone had ever heard about Covid. People were learning on the job how to use the basic functionality but as we were discovering before this, there is a whole world of possibilities.

We too have the standard chat functionality and the standard call functionality as offered by MS Teams and which you probably have as well. 

Our strategy was to build these into quick contact collaboration and communication streams between all supply chain and operations departments, fostering a mix of social and business related conversations with the rule that we should phone or chat on Teams first before sending an email, with this latter platform being used to follow up with formal notes, documents etc and as a tool became extremely valuable in driving Value stream team culture and performance.

MS teams opened the door to MS Planner (now tasks) for us. Planner too is an out of the box solution, which is primarily a system allowing you to manage, collaborate on, delegate and report on projects and tasks. We were able to digitize our entire physical/card based continuous improvement systems in our supply chain and operational sites within the planner environment. Teams on the ground still able to access and manipulate the action development while each layer of hierarchy can access all improvement actions from anywhere in the world on a pc/ laptop, tablet or mobile. The level of momentum in action development and decision making again cutting out waste in the continuous improvement process itself and it really started to drive value.

"Citizen development of out of the box systems and solutions available to all organisations is a truly exciting prospect" 

All functions now have a dedicated channel in MS Teams for the management of their function, into which we took the next steps into citizen development. Remember we have been using LinkedIn learning, google and YouTube to achieve this with IT as a function supporting access rights and licencing. Making further use of these learning platforms we integrated Power Bi into MS teams and went on to develop an entire control tower structure for all supply chain and operations departments. These consist of a plethora of data sources tapped into from ERP systems and data sets held in SharePoint, feeding over 130 reports with core data, and again feeding 20 dashboards of metrics for each department housed within their own channel. This allowed for control tower meeting and review processes to be developed to drive conversation around core data. Here the real value driven has again been in the ability to process large amounts of data into easy to review chunks upon which we can make decisions…. quickly and accurately. The decision-making process has had a lot of waste taken out of it as a result.

The most exciting discovery now for us has been during the establishment of a dedicated Operational Excellence function. In setting this function up we have focused on a strategy of engagement, reactivity, and proactivity. It is in the proactivity (and obviously the reactivity) element of that strategy that we can see focussing on operational efficiency and productivity will be the key to driving value and performance in the business moving forward. The aim here is how we become more efficient or more productive, not to cut cost but to grow! Out of the box solutions here offer step change potential. Power Automate is an underutilised jewel in the crown if process control and improvement and unlocks the ability to connect to over 800 different systems and platforms to aid automation of processes.

In the scale of process automation, RPA (Robotic process automation) is for big, common processes e.g., end of the month invoicing batch run, whereas process automation can unlock the efficiencies available in day-to-day processes. In a recent project an entire job management platform was developed with the use of Power Automate connecting to Outlook, SharePoint, MS forms, Power Bi, Ms Planner and took a process with 15 manual process steps down to 3 with the remaining 12 fully automated. If you now look at Process Advisor (a part of power automate) the ability to map processes, variations in how they run in the same jobs and then process points that could be automated with power automate, the potential becomes even greater.

Maybe not a silver bullet, but the relevance here is the ability to learn about, implement, develop, and innovate, through citizen development with access and licencing support from IT, thereby allowing people who do the job to make it more efficient and productive … it comes close to being just that.