[00:00:01.360] - PMO Joe
Do you wonder if others are dealing with the same project management challenges as you, not sure where to turn for guidance and leadership? Office Hours are in session as we discuss project management and PMOs with global leaders, hearing their story and learning their secrets to success. Our goal is to empower power you and help you elevate your PMO and project management career to new heights. Welcome back to Project Management Office Hours with your host Pmo Joe.
[00:00:30.040] - PMO Joe
Welcome everyone to Project Management Office Hours. We're the number one live project management radio show in the United States, broadcasting to you from the Phoenix Business RadioX Studios in Tempe, Arizona. I'm your host, PMO Joe, and for the next hour or so, we're going to be talking project management and citizen development today as well. Before we jump into the show, as we always do, a couple of announcements. First, want to thank the PMI Alamo chapter. They hosted me last week. I was in town in San Antonio, first in person speaking appearance since the Pandemic. So it was great to have the energy and interaction of an audience. So I really appreciate them having me come into town talking PMOs and organizational maturity. It was a great discussion and certainly thank you to everybody for the warm reception and the input during the session. Also want to invite everybody to register for The PMO Leader conference (www.thepmoleader.com) that is coming up here on October 18. And we've got the link here, we'll put it in the show notes. For those not familiar. We're going to be starting at 09:00am in Perth, Australia. And then we're going to be live for 18 consecutive hours.
[00:01:49.830] - PMO Joe
Just bringing you content from around the world, 30 plus speakers, six different continents. Couldn't get anybody from Antarctica. We tried real hard, but we couldn't do that. And we're just going to be following the sun, right? We're just going to keep moving west, starting in Australia and work our way around the world, finishing up in the United States. So again, that'll be 18 hours of consecutive live content on project management, PMOs change management, volunteering, you name it. All of the topics within our industry that we're coming familiar with. Some great speakers. Lee Lambert be joining us. Ruth Pearce, Bill Dow, Amireh Amiramazahari, Carstan Ley, Dr Mazen Gadir, Yasmina Khelifi and so many more, right? It's going to be an amazing experience. So really looking forward to having you all there. It's free. Thanks to our sponsors, KeyedIn, Planisware, and BPM Vision are covering the cost of the program. So for everybody, it's just free to go and we'd love to have you join us. This is show 112. We are live. And for everybody out there, that's in PMI land and looking for PDUs. Right? As you have to refresh those each year. Each show runs about an hour, so they're good for one PDU and your self reported pool.
[00:03:11.080] - PMO Joe
So there's an amazing library of discussions with leaders from around the world and within our industry that I would highly recommend that you tap into. We've got to get the PDUs anyway, so you might as well make it be a fun and entertaining way to do that. Or maybe I'm biased. I think it's fun and entertaining. Who knows if you do as well, but strongly encourage you to go out there and check out our old shows. You can get them on any of your favorite podcast platforms or also out in our website, out on the PMO squad. You can get that as well. We're live streaming on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and of course, on Internet Radio through Phoenix Business RadioX. So we're excited to have you join us live. So if we slip up, it's because we're a live show, we're not recorded, like a lot of the podcasts are out there. And I'm super excited to have our guests with us today. I'll allow them to introduce themselves, but we'll bring them all up here. We have Dali Ninkovic, Matt Hubbard and Michael McCullough. Thank you so much for joining us all. Dali, if you can take a moment to introduce yourselves and let everybody know a little bit more about you.
[00:04:20.070] - Dalibor Ninkovic
Thank you, Joe. It's a pleasure to be here. And thank you for inviting me. My name is Dali Ninkovic. As you said, I'm currently working as a global BTC and Chapter Engagement Manager for PMI with a primary focus on system development. I've joined PMI at the beginning of this year following almost three decades of low code or no code, even before it was called low code or no code industry. So I believe I bring a wealth of experience from both technology point of view as well as the business to this practice. And, yeah, that's me, in short.
[00:04:59.160] - PMO Joe
Thank you so much. And you're joining us from London, I believe you said London area. So good to have you joining us.
[00:05:04.870] - Dalibor Ninkovic
Yeah, as you can see, it's dark outside.
[00:05:08.140] - PMO Joe
Awesome. Thank you for taking some of your evening away to join us, Matt. Repeat guest on the show, but folks may not have seen the first one. So if you can take a moment to introduce yourself as well.
[00:05:20.130] - Matt Hubbard
Yeah, certainly. Joe. How you doing, everybody? Dali. Mike. Joe. Joe, congratulations on five years and this being your 112th episode, that's phenomenal by any standard. As Joe said, I was on the show last year, almost a year ago to the day, and we were talking about citizen development. My name is Matt Hubbard. I'm the head of Operational Excellence at TrackVia.
[00:05:44.160] - Matt Hubbard
TrackVia is a lowcode no code technology platform, and low code, no code is the technology that enables citizen developers to do what they do. They're not programmers. They need a technology that allows them to drag and drop and make their own apps. And that's what my company does, track the background. I'm a process improvement professional. That's what I am at the core. I've been doing that for over 20 years and I discovered low code, no code in citizen development about twelve years ago because I just couldn't control my processes with spreadsheets and email and building a full blown system. Cost too much, took too long and I didn't get to make any changes. So I learned to be a citizen developer and I feel like it's my superpower now. So I am here to tell everybody about it because I think it will change their lives like it has changed mine.
[00:06:35.130] - PMO Joe
Awesome. And another thing you got going for you, can see you're a Michigan fan, so I like that as well. All right. And Michael, welcome. You're coming from the East Coast, I believe, right?
[00:06:46.440] - Michael McCullough
I am, yes. Thank you very much for having me. I'm completely beside myself. An honor to be here, so I appreciate it. So a little bit about myself while I'm actually usually coming from Suffolk, Virginia area, but right now the family and I are on vacation up in the mountains of Virginia. So hopefully my internet stays strong. But I am the citizen development business architect for Amtrak. We've been on the citizen development journey in Amtrak for about four years now, two years with actual CD program. And I got to tell you, I couldn't be more proud of the folks that I work with. We went from two developers to just under 400, went from twelve apps to just under 3000, 4000. I don't want to short them, so they're doing amazing work. You know, I started my journey on low code or citizen development about 9-10 years ago at Anthem. I was part of a process improvement project, contract optimization team. And one thing that I always found is there was never one solution, there was never one way to do things. And so always having that dream of that, if I only had this one thing that could help fix our problems, it kind of got me in the quest for finding that and I finally did find it in citizen development.
[00:08:20.200] - Michael McCullough
So thanks for having me again.
[00:08:22.360] - PMO Joe
Yeah, my pleasure. It's great to have you with us and to be able to get a customer's perspective right, application of the tools and mindset and not just the vendor who is supporting it. It's the real world. This is what we want to be able to present to people. So I think it's great to have that perspective. As we talked about Matt with us last year to talk about this and Dali, I think not everybody, of course, that's going to listen to the show would have heard last year's show. So let's start from the basics. Let's create some common ground for everybody. And citizen developer, what is that? Why is PMI involved? If you can kind of lay the groundwork for us.
[00:09:05.370] - Dalibor Ninkovic
Absolutely. Thank you. Joe. Well, system development, both Matt and Mike both explained it really well in terms of the first question is it a new job role? It's not. It is what Matt likes to say. It's just a new way of working. So we are fortunate enough today that we have a technology that allows nonprofessional programmers to create apps. And this is something that's been kind of in demand for a very, very long time. And fortunately, we are at the point now with the technology to actually enable that. Now, why is this important? Well, it's important for several reasons, I believe. Because if you look at the modern world that we live in today, we are essentially living in kind of a software world. Everything from your kitchen appliances to your cars to your mobile phones, everything requires software nowadays. And the simple fact in the market is today that there isn't enough professional developers to handle that. So the It backlogs within the organization has just continued to grow and that's causing more and more pains for the businesses. They are becoming less and less competitive over time. So the solution became obvious through what we call now the assistant development.
[00:10:19.690] - Dalibor Ninkovic
Now, this is a term that Gartner invented, whether we call it system development, whether we're going to call it in ten years time, system development, that's development. The simple fact remains that through the use of technology, we enable business domain knowledge holders, as I like to call them, to create apps. And who better to create these apps to enable business to function better and in more competitive way than those users? Now, why is the Project Management Institute involved in this? Well, if you look at the project management role and the modern project management role, I mean, project management and I think we can all agree I'm not project manager, I come from software development background, but I worked with all the project managers over the last decade. That role has evolved and it's evolved to the point where project managers, it's expected more from the project managers nowadays than it was 20 years ago, for example. So it's not just simple enough to kind of manage project from start to finish. Nowadays we live in a very dynamic world. So project managers need this. I'd like to call them digital accelerators, let's call it that way.
[00:11:29.470] - Dalibor Ninkovic
I think that's a good term, digital accelerators, as a kind of a complementary skills to the existing project management skills to kind of identify and manage these projects and lead these initiatives in the organizations, which subsequently will lead to kind of greater benefits for the organization. It will relieve the pain of the It because they don't have to do everything at the same time, it will keep the project managers, I would say, more relevant in today's more kind of software driven, dynamic world. I think I can see on Matt's face that he's agreed, but I'm pretty sure he's got something to add to that.
[00:12:06.710] - Matt Hubbard
I've always got something to add to it, but I don't know if that's a problem for me to jump in because I can go on and on and talk and talk. But since you said so, I do. I can't help myself. I'm just so excited about citizen development. I know it's a weird kind of nerdy thing, but that's what makes me gosh. A few things you said, Dali, that just struck me. So you talked about the term citizen development. It is kind of a weird term. It's the term we have some folks have wrestled around with other terms, but I'll just tell I think it's funny. Very quick story. I was introducing citizen development to somebody and they had no idea what it was. And when I used the term, they seriously said, is that a nefarious plan for the government to control their population? That threw me off guard. But no, that's not what it is in this context. Maybe it is somewhere else. But I mean, I get it. Citizen like the average citizen, we don't have the superpower of coding, right? So that's where citizen comes from. And then we're developing apps as an average citizen.
[00:13:13.920] - Matt Hubbard
So that was one thing, the term, maybe it'll change. My buddy, he's a friend of mine and an ex business partner, he refers to it as, yeah, someday it'll just be called work. Like you said, Dali, today people spin up spreadsheets. And that's kind of what you expect when people go to work, right? You're expecting that they're spinning up spreadsheets and tracking stuff and sending emails. That's called work. In today's, day and age today and moving forward, you'll start to see people like, of course, yeah, I'm going to spin up an app really quick because I can, and that will be called work. So jeez, I told you I could go on and on. That's just the word, citizen development.
[00:13:51.190] - Dalibor Ninkovic
Right.
[00:13:53.060] - Matt Hubbard
The second piece I want to lean in on is the citizen development for project managers. I'm thinking, like, why project managers? I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and I think it's two things. Why should project managers care about citizen development? One, to get more done, but two, at lower costs. And so what I mean by this is, as you said, Dali, we have high demand for applications today, right? So Microsoft estimated that the digital demand for applications to be built is 500 million apps over the course of the next five years, which is more than the last 40 years combined. Let's just sit on that for a second. Holy cow. Right? That's gigantic. And so that's the demand to complement that is the supply of coders is low. 86% of decision makers today say that the number one challenge to digitally transform is basically the shortage of software developers. And so then that's where citizen development comes in. So if a company can build up a citizen development program where they not only have their own programmers on site or accessible as a third party, but they also have staff on site that can be part time citizen developers into their regular job.
[00:15:20.100] - Matt Hubbard
Project managers are going to have a.
[00:15:21.600] - Michael McCullough
Bigger resource pool to pull from.
[00:15:24.730] - Matt Hubbard
Not every project is going to be suitable for low code, no code and citizen development, but for those that are, project managers can tap into those resources. Another one and gosh, I apologize for just going on and on, but I have just two more I want to share. Project managers. This came up, a project manager told me this recently. She said that she's using citizen development to manage scope creep. So what happens is the project is moving along, they've got the requirements, they determine upfront, this is what we want to build. And later on they discover, I actually like these things in my project. And what she's doing is saying, okay, great. Those are kind of simple things. A citizen developer can do them.
[00:16:06.520] - Michael McCullough
Why don't we COBUILD?
[00:16:07.770] - Matt Hubbard
So the customer is building those scope creep items in parallel with the project delivery team that manages the cost and the timeline. I thought it was brilliant.
[00:16:18.300] - Dalibor Ninkovic
That also links to the change management, doesn't it? Yeah.
[00:16:21.280] - Matt Hubbard
Tell me more about that.
[00:16:22.740] - Dalibor Ninkovic
One of the typical examples is what I've seen in kind of best uses of system development is, like we said, where the business demands changes in the software apps that they're currently using. Now, those changes traditionally would go to the It, so it goes into backlog and then subsequently, as we all know by now, it is overwhelmed with all of these changes that they need to make to the exempt. Now imagine the case where these changes could be actually delegated to the business domain holders instead of waiting for 612 months to deliver them. Imagine if they can do themselves. I mean, that would for me, that's one of the because normally people usually I mean, from my experience, people usually calculate the cost of software development, but nobody really looks into the cost of software ownership over the years. And that's the biggest cost comes and accumulates over time that I've seen in the organizations. Imagine if that cost can be brought down significantly by delegating these change management tasks to the actual system developers instead of actually putting them on your It.
[00:17:31.390] - Matt Hubbard
I think I see what you mean. So when you're referring to change management, in this case, you've already launched the production version of the app. Now we're moving into the future. Business is changing, requirements are changing, so the app needs to change. And I'll tell you what, in the very first technology project I tried to tackle over 15 years ago, I was quoted $10 million to build. Ten years to build and no changes. You got one shot. You got to get it right the first time because the coders aren't waiting for you to decide what changes you need. You got to get back in line. And so this is an interesting concept you and I have never talked about this before, but citizen developers can be used to build the apps, but they can also be used to continuously improve and tweak the apps. So that model is really interesting. You could have an app that was actually built by it on a low co no code platform. They handled all the heavy lifting, but then when they handed it over, the citizen developers realized, I need some different reports and notifications and a change here.
[00:18:37.590] - Matt Hubbard
If they're equipped, they can do that. That makes good sense.
[00:18:41.650] - Michael McCullough
It really comes down to scalability. So kind of going a little bit back. I think one of the other things that the citizen development does, and we have a lot of experience at Amtrak with this, is we're about 50 years old and so we are kind of the cliche of inefficient, or we were the cliche of inefficiency and business model. We were four companies. We got consolidated into one and we had four It departments, four Hrs. But then as the years went on, we're publicly funded and so they're like, hey, we need to kind of start streamlining operations. What happened was is that initially before the citizen development, we had all the normal process improvement challenges of this person or this department not talking to this person, these folks not understanding the mission or roles or goals of this group. Through citizen development, through these individual people starting to talk. They started plugging these things in and it's, it's like connecting a spider web. You literally through a grassroots effort of just trying to work right. Not even really what we would think of as grand improvement. It's we're connecting these people together, connecting their talents, connecting their knowledge, and that spreads like wildfire throughout the company.
[00:20:03.220] - Michael McCullough
One of the things that I was asked to do when I initially came to Amtrak was find a way to report on project management. You know, we had all these folks doing project management in lots of different ways and methodologies. We had a team come in, stand up EPMO, and they said, hey, listen, we need one method to look at what we're spending. Just literally what we were spending at the time. So there were, I want to say, three or four different PM reporting systems out there, none of which they were accurate for their purpose, but not overall for the company. So being able to tap into the different systems and then show the reporting, we started getting the message out there what was going on. The Pen book was starting to be utilized. People were getting certified as their PMPs. Then people started to understand, oh hey, we need a way to do track milestones, risks, updates, inputs, scope, schedule. Well, we didn't have the budget or the time because all this stuff needed to be done. Yesterday we built four major PM supporting applications. It took about 1300 development hours. Now, mind you, this is all scaled over the course of about a year, year and a half, and it's actually grown since then.
[00:21:27.670] - Michael McCullough
We have about 1300 baseline users want to say, the last time I looked, we had about $1.8 million invested with licensing operations. We've given back the Unmeasurable stuff. And I guess we could measure it. But the Unmeasurable is increased project management. Participation in reporting. Better project results. Better decision making capabilities from the executive suites. And we've given back about 1.2 million hour back to the company and personnel hours. And we've saved. I want to say as of last week. It's about $68 million that's over the course of four and a half years. So those are numbers that I think don't really lie, I think. But the most important thing as you guys were talking about is it's scalable. We've continued to evolve, we've continued to change as the business has changed.
[00:22:24.260] - PMO Joe
I think the question for me from the outsider looking in, right, no investment in this in any way other than just hosting this show, and I'm trying to put it into my own career and where I've seen something similar to this. I go back to the 90s or so. I can go back to the when I was working and shadow, it existed, and organizations were trying to put governance in place to be able to say, listen, you can't have a server underneath your desk and not let us know about it because somebody could hack into it. So we need to encrypt it. So there's this big battle between the business and it over where technology was going to be managed. And then as the Blackberries and the iPhone started to come in, that shifted and turned off, and there were people who would walk around with two Blackberries. I had my personal one, I had my work one, because work wouldn't allow them to be on the same device. Well, now I have six or seven email accounts on my phone, because that's just normal, right? That's just the way it is. So I see this as it sounds like we don't do this in my organization.
[00:23:32.610] - PMO Joe
But it sounds like another way to be able to make an organization more efficient. Because the people who are doing the actual work within their business unit. They know what they need to get done. And they just go out and they have the tools now to be able to implement that without going through the command infrastructure of another department. So the question that comes out of that then is, what if they do it wrong? What if it doesn't give them what they need? How does the organization handle a market research analyst now going off and creating a low code no code app that's providing numbers into the C suite that decisions are being made on. So I don't know who wants to kind of take up a response to that type of question.
[00:24:17.440] - Dalibor Ninkovic
I can certainly go, I'll stop I'm saying this because I've actually experienced this myself in my soccer career. You touched on very interesting topic there. How does It department look at the system development as a whole? Because It will basically say, well, there's no way we can let these people kind of develop apps. I mean, we've got sensitive data, et cetera, et cetera. And I always say to people, simply, development is not about people just grabbing the first tool that's next to them and start building apps without any control of governance. Now, if that's the case, then you're going to end up with the shadow It. And that is a very dangerous and risky concept for any organization. So the idea behind system development is that it's done in the It functioned way, let's put it this way. So it still needs to be involved. Of course they need to be involved during the selection of the local platform. Whether that's one or multiple platforms, it doesn't matter. I usually kind of promote multiple platforms because one platform does affect all the use cases that people might have. It needs to make sure that the appropriate data guidance is in place, how the corporate standards are followed, make sure that the citizens are trained, et cetera.
[00:25:43.990] - Dalibor Ninkovic
Now, I'm not saying this is just a task for the It, but it needs to be part of this. I like to call it as center of Excellence. So every organization that's considering sets of development on a larger scale, I would strongly suggest creating the center of Excellence, which is a combination of the business and It people who are in charge of setting these rules and training and everything else that surrounds the system development initiative. It's only then when you roll this out to the wider kind of business that's my two cent on that topic, I would say. But I'm sure Mike and Matt have something to contribute as well.
[00:26:26.590] - Michael McCullough
No, I totally agree with you. And probably one thing that should be mentioned is citizen development needs to have, like David said, you have to have guidelines, you have to have standards. It has to be an organized effort. I don't believe that it is solely the job or really the job of the PMO or the project manager. It needs to be a separate entity. So I am what's called the citizen development business architect of our company. My role is to develop guidelines, standards, governance, provide training, input. I am an advocate for the developers, the citizen developers. I'm also a guardian of our enterprise. So data and whatnot. And you need to kind of sit in between the It department and your developers and act as a conduit. You're also presenting material to your executives. You're talking to the directors, the VPs, ABPS and bringing that value, that explanation of what are they doing, what are they not doing for your citizen development program? I think it's an important role because if you don't, if you shut everything down, or if it runs this program and makes citizen development another bureaucratic method of getting things done, you're going to get shadow it.
[00:27:58.680] - Michael McCullough
And that is exactly one of the things that we worked or challenged at Amtrak. Was we had probably four different systems that literally. We couldn't buy pencils without this system. But it was a shadow it built thing that somebody had worked with. Like 20 years ago. Worked with it. And it got it implemented. But we couldn't shut it off and start with a new system because we had no idea what it did. So, yeah, I think there definitely needs to be some guidelines and constructing it. But at the same time, I'm all about making sure that my folks or the CDs can create on the fly when they need to, but provide that guidance.
[00:28:39.670] - Dalibor Ninkovic
You just want to say you still need to better leave that creativity.
[00:28:44.440] - Michael McCullough
They have to.
[00:28:45.880] - PMO Joe
And Matt, from a vendor perspective, that's in the space now supporting it. What's the growth look like? We talked a year ago, so a year has gone by. Are you seeing the use case and utility and organizations continue to grow? Is there more energy behind this now? This is why we wanted to revisit it, because I think when we left off last year, it was fairly new at the time, and it's like, well, I'm skeptic over here. I'm like, we'll see if this flies. So what's it like? What have you seen over the past year?
[00:29:18.670] - Matt Hubbard
Yeah, the short answer to that is yes, that energy has drastically increased in the last year. Very different from one year ago. I think it was marked with heavy skepticism one year ago. Now the arms are coming down going, I'll listen, this is starting to make a little more sense to me. Let me give you some examples for that. So I would say a few years ago, I struggled to connect with CIOs to discuss on this topic of citizen development and leveraging low code no code with their business folks. Recently, I met with some CIOs and one of them told me, yeah, we tried that. We gave a low code no code platform to the business. And frankly, I wasn't impressed with what they built. How did that work? Did you support them? Did you train them? Did you give them best practices or guardrails? No, we just like, says, here's your platform, good luck. Right. And so the way I view any sustainable business operation, a healthy sustainable operation is you have to nurture three components. And just imagine this as a Venn diagram, okay? So the people, the technology and the process, you have to all three coming together.
[00:30:35.360] - Matt Hubbard
Until PMI entered the citizen development arena just a year and a half ago or so, we only had the people in the technology. We had people like me who were like, craving to get off a spreadsheet so I could do something. Better. And we had low code, no code technology that worked, but we didn't have any framework or guardrail. So what I was noticing since I got started, citizen development over ten years ago, I think somebody at PMI validated this is we were seeing pockets of success, but nowhere did we see this scale in a healthy, sustainable way across an organization. And it's because that process framework, the management framework, the role that Mike just described that he's doing, it didn't exist. Now, some people did try to create their own framework, but it's much easier for momentum to be gained when a trusted organization like PMI enters the arena and creates that framework and baseline for everybody to start operating from and move forward. And basically, I think PMI knocked it out of the park with their Citizen Developer Foundation course. They created this, like, really easy course to consume. It's only 90 minutes, but it really imparts on you.
[00:31:54.810] - Matt Hubbard
The why citizen development. The how citizen development. How do you do that in a safe and effective way without stifling creativity? And they impart that in like 90 minutes. And then most people, CIOs included, that take that course, that 90 minutes course. They are leaning in afterwards going, oh, okay, I see I was missing the process piece before. We could probably do this a little smarter.
[00:32:22.350] - Dalibor Ninkovic
Yeah, it took us a lot longer than 90 minutes to create that clues.
[00:32:31.240] - Michael McCullough
Matt, you hit the nail on the head. So having been a part of developing that software agnostic look at Citizen Development, I always thought that was a critical part of it. And you know, we all like to think that, hey, we kind of believe in what we do. We really put a lot of credence into our theories and whatnot. But two weeks ago, I was at a software conference down in Orlando, and it was funny. I'm sitting there and I'm watching all these amazing apps being built and all these really cool things being done in like ten minutes, 20 minutes, AI forms, pictures, all kinds of really cool stuff. But the biggest thing that was missing was the how. And in my conversations with people over the course of probably five days, I probably had 100 separate conversations when people found out what we were doing at Amtrak and how we built. How did you do it? How did you get people to get on board with this? How did you get them training? How did you break that it barrier to where it bless their hearts? They want to do the right thing. They want to protect the organization, but they want to shut everything down.
[00:33:51.520] - Michael McCullough
How did you get them to not do that? And I think that was the biggest takeaway for me. I mean, number one, hey, it was like, it's here. This is happening. And wow, we have so many large companies and innovative companies such as Mats getting on board with this, but it's the how do you do this and make it a success? That's the trick.
[00:34:15.860] - Dalibor Ninkovic
If I just may add to that, basically I read the poster report from two years ago. Only two years ago there was around 100 low code, no code vendors out there in the market. Two years later, which is now we have close to 500, we've got actually 472 local vendors in the market or platforms. Now I just want to say not every single one of them is suitable for the system development because some of them are a bit more technical. So they're mainly focused on the It, productivity, etc, etc. But the simple fact remains is that there is definitely a need in the market for these platforms and the need arises from the lack of software development and the increase of demand for software applications. And fortunately, these platforms are made in such a way nowadays that we can enable system developers. Like I said at the beginning. Now the critical thing is just to add to what Mike and Matt were saying is what was missing for the scalable kind of implementation of system development across any organization. I mean, if you're talking about a small organization with two or three people, then you don't need any of that.
[00:35:26.610] - Dalibor Ninkovic
You don't need those guidelines because it's possible for them to control that very easily. But if you're talking about any sort of larger scale organization that's looking development, the main obstacle was the lack of standards, guidelines, tools, frameworks tools that will help people manage that risk and govern the process that will take the organization from experimenting with the local technology to the innovation point which you know they're going to reach after a certain period of time. I normally say to people, I'm not a huge supporter of big bank, especially when it comes to software development. I always say start small, smart, start maybe across one department within the organization and see how it works. Polish out the errors and everything else and then move forward. And the tools that we provide now they help people with that because not every project is suitable for certain developments. There are some which should be still with the It, some of them with some help with the It, but there are huge masses of applications that are perfectly suitable for business developers to do it themselves.
[00:36:39.260] - Michael McCullough
I think the software changes so rapidly as well that if you focus I do talk here and there. One of the things that I say is when you're implementing a citizen development program or you're attempting to, you need to focus 75% on that change management, that organizational implementation of your CD program and then look at 25% of the software. Number one, I would say try to use what you have. If you got something laying around in house that you're already paying for, try to use it, get a taste for it. Once you share some successes, once you can start to quantify that initial ROI, the investment, then you can go out and go, oh well, am I an Apple? Am I Betty blocks. Am I a Track, via or Microsoft? Then you can start looking at scaling your program with the software. The other thing I like to kind of look at is you can cross pollinate citizen development software. So we're working with some GIS software, locked software, and we're implementing it with another software suite. And so there, there's lots that you can do. But the bottom line is you want your processes, you want your guidelines to structure your support there.
[00:37:57.660] - PMO Joe
Before you start again, I'm trying to put this into my own experiences and mindset here. I think back to work for Tekstron a long time ago, parent company Bell Helicopter, Cessna Aircraft, and others, and they implemented Six Sigma throughout the organization. And it wasn't just in the manufacturing floor where they were doing this. It was everywhere. So you could get a set of tools and training in a process to be able to make your job more efficient without having to go run an enterprise project. You could run a small green belt project to go in and utilize a set of tools to be able to make the company more efficient and therefore more profitable and the shareholders happier and shadow. It was kind of that mindset right, where we allowed more to happen because the organization could be more efficient if we allowed a broader base within the organization to do some of the things that they need to do. We have accidental project managers running probably more than half of the projects in companies around the world. And maybe the focus isn't we shouldn't be trying to get them all to become PMPs, we just need to give them some skills to run projects better.
[00:39:13.690] - PMO Joe
All of a sudden, a cap on comes around, right, a lower level certification. And now what I'm hearing through this discussion from all you guys in the utilization and use cases, it's similar to this mindset right. We're not trying to create a brand new function in the organization. What we're trying to do is empower the existing functions to do what they're already doing, but do it in a less invasive way so that the company can be more lowercase agile, to be able to be more efficient and produce. Am I hearing this correctly?
[00:39:47.210] - Michael McCullough
Yeah, somebody asked me last week, I was on a similar call, and we were talking about bridging the gap between the business and it, and somebody brought up a question or a topic and they said, how do you deal with doing more with less in citizen development or in this business? And I said, I kind of stopped for a second. I said, you know, actually, I'm kind of going to challenge that mentality. I wouldn't say that you're doing more with less, but when you create this capability, when you nurture this ability to problem solve, to create these quick wins, but to do it in a way that is beneficial to the company. You're doing more with more. You're empowering a whole set of people that are able to critically problem solve everyday problems. And it's not one small, trained sect of people. It's not that one process improvement department. It is the entire employee orientation. It's amazing.
[00:40:53.550] - Dalibor Ninkovic
Mike, I've got a question for you. Now, you touched on something very sensitive, because I've heard comments about citizen development. Just gives me more work. I mean, how did your employees have on the look at the development? Do they feel that there's something that's empowering them and increases job satisfaction? Or is it something that they look at like, oh, additional burden, I just have to do more now? Yes.
[00:41:18.730] - Michael McCullough
No, that's a great question, and you're absolutely right. And I have run into that before where people have asked me that, and I'll say, citizen development isn't about always doing it yourself. Right. So as a project manager or a PMO leader, your primary responsibility is to produce results, to drive efficient project results. So, case in point. I was two years ago, I'm sitting up in Washington, DC. We've got this new thing called COVID. Nobody knows what it is, nobody knew how to handle it. And in the transportation industry, that was a significant concern to us. So we assembled this incident response team. We are trying to figure out the best way forward. And we had some very talented project managers there managing these small little projects that people were trying to implement. Somebody had asked, can we track where are all of our facilities? We have 900 plus. We're in 46 of the 48 lower states. And they wanted to see where all the coded cases were at, where our employees were at. And they went to it, the PM did, and said, hey, can we do this? And they said, well, yeah, sure. It's like four or five different systems that we would have to pull from.
[00:42:42.700] - Michael McCullough
It take us probably about two months. And this is roughly your budget. All the executives were like, yeah, no, we need this information, like, today. And so had the PM's been aware at the time of citizen development and the capabilities, they could have turned to me and said, hey, Mike, can we do something really quickly that can meet this demand right now? Now, having been in the support role, I actually turned to my boss at the time and said, hey, Serena, I think I can do this in like, a week. And so I went to the It guy, the head It guy that was sitting in the room with us, super nice. And I explained what the he was and would he have a problem. With me trying this, I was able to I want to see 36 hours worth of development connect four or five different systems through a dashboard, which included the CDC information, provide an app to all the different station managers to track incidents, cleanliness, all this other stuff. And we're still using it today. So I would challenge that. Really the trick is it's not that you're polymer stuff onto the project manager, it's you're giving them an understanding that they can go out to these individuals and say, hey, I see we have this problem, maybe is there something that we can do?
[00:44:03.720] - Michael McCullough
Or when somebody comes to them and says, oh, I don't want to have to record over 100 different requirements. Let's use AI to feed these sheets of paper in here. They don't scoff at it and go, well no, they understand the value that that can provide.
[00:44:19.460] - Matt Hubbard
So citizen development gives the project managers more options as opposed to the one that tends to take a while and might consume some heavier resources. There's probably another angle to this giving me more work, not just for the project managers, but for the citizen developers themselves because oftentimes they have a day job, right? And so Dali, I don't know if that's who you were referring to, but I've heard that tossed out there before I've got a day job. I don't have time to develop apps. Well, I guess there's two things I would throw out at that. One is you're probably developing spreadsheets and there are a lot of people who are putting heavy macros into their spreadsheets to try to make them more efficient. But they can never get the job done like an actual app can. And so nobody's talking about the time they're spending to build these spreadsheets, right? They're talking about the time that they would be spending to build the apps. The apps don't take that long to build with low code, no code today. So I would say it's about a wash as far as like, building the tool, but then the savings you have in your operations because you can actually automate things.
[00:45:29.170] - Matt Hubbard
Oh my gosh, it's a godsend.
[00:45:31.470] - Dalibor Ninkovic
I have a very interesting experience to mention. I mean, I'm not allowed to mention any names, but I'm just going to say it was a large company with over 1000 employees, global, massive, multibillion dollar organization. And I usually use this example because it's actually really good and it does relate to the project managers, essentially. Large organizations nowadays have what they call continuous improvement programs, where the organizations are continuously looking to find better ways to work, to save money, to make money either way. And I worked very closely with a team of project managers who were traditionally managing project by project. One project, you start with multiple projects and you finish them and you deliver them and that's it. But they've heard of sets and development, they've read our book and that's kind of intrigued them. So what they've done is this is actually a really amazing use case. I would say they've created the survey across the whole organization to identify what potential apps business users would actually require to make their job more efficient. And then they managed to quantify how many hours per week or a year they would save by doing this long term implications as well.
[00:46:48.370] - Dalibor Ninkovic
The survey came back with about 1200 potential apps. Like I said, the beginning, not every single one of them was suitable for the citizen development. But because they understood the criteria for citizen development apps from our book, they identified around 540 applications suitable for set development. When you multiply that with all of those hours saved or efficiency, et cetera, et cetera, the estimated cost saving or saving was between 30 and 50 million, roughly. This was just an estimation pound over three years period. Now, to me, Michael already mentioned some normal savings figures. I mean, namely one organization that's not looking to save money or to make money. Now, I see project managers as very unique individuals who have this broad view of everything that's happening across the organizations. And for me, they are perfectly positioned to identify these projects, to actually lead these projects, to create, to experiment with the sets and development, to actually lead the whole initiative within the organization, to bring it to the stakeholders. For me, that was really one of the best use cases I've ever heard of.
[00:48:04.990] - Matt Hubbard
Dali, I'd like to lean in on that one just a little bit and I'd like to combine it with something Joe brought up, lean Six Sigma.
[00:48:12.210] - PMO Joe
Right?
[00:48:12.370] - Matt Hubbard
We're trying to find improvements in our organization. Now, you just mentioned some organization that found and suggested like 500 different improvements and theoretically they could result if they all got implemented, they could result in a certain amount of money. Well, I'm going to try to remember Demaic. Joe with Lean six Sigma. Are you familiar with Demaic? It is a five step process. Define, measure, analyze, implement, and control. If I got that right, so I get my words wrong.
[00:48:44.220] - Michael McCullough
Okay, sure.
[00:48:46.010] - Matt Hubbard
What would happen often is you would get through the define, the measure, the analyze, and then you got to the implement and you're like, okay, I'm stuck. Right? Because now a lot of these suggestions are digital improvements and I don't have a way to implement it. So it goes in the backlog and it ends up being like this great analysis project and a suggestion that was made, but it's never really seen through to the end. Implementation often takes the form of spreadsheets and email control, then becomes how do you control with spreadsheets and email? I think this is just my opinion. I'm interested in what you guys think about this citizen development with low code. No, code is like Lean Six Sigma's next best friend. Our new best friend, I should say, because I think it can help realize more of the savings that we are thinking we can achieve in our heads.
[00:49:43.000] - Michael McCullough
Yeah, no, you're 100% right, Matt. Like I was mentioning at the beginning, of the show. So I got my lean six Sigma black belt. I was doing a lot of that in the initial part of my career, trying to support the projects and the contracts. But because business is starting to move at a more rapid pace and oh, by the way, now we have a hybrid, a true hybrid workforce trying to implement or truly implement and control a lot of these improvements has become next to impossible. I think that's where we fall short so many times people will find something cumbersome or not as effective as they would like it. Because let's be honest, I mean, we don't always get exactly what we want when we go to It, but that's just because a break of understanding of what they do and then for what we do. So I think the rapid solutions, the rapid development and the rapid implementation and the scalability truly brings that method of hey, look what we have, it's easy. And if somebody goes, I like that, but gosh, that button is in the wrong spot. So we can move the button very quickly and boom, the customer is happy and they start using it.
[00:51:01.900] - Michael McCullough
They don't then go and start doing a spreadsheet or an email or on the back of a napkin, even though now with AI, we can read those things and our implementations are a lot more successful.
[00:51:13.750] - Dalibor Ninkovic
Mike, you just touched on that business versus It kind of gap. And like I said, I've been in the software development industry for a very long time now and that's always been there. And if people kind of organizations kind of stick with that model where the business writes requirements in the Word document and hand it over to the It, very few of those projects have succeeded. It interprets those Word documents in a completely different way. But imagine what this development enables these business people now is to build prototypes, build minimum viable products with the exact requirements, what they actually need. And even if it's if it's not that complicated, they can finish those projects with the It guidance. But if it's too complex, at least they handed over to the It at that stage where It can finish it off and they can still participate in that maintenance and change management process afterwards. And that for me, is where the biggest kind of bridging that gap between the business and It is nowadays. Because you literally with the sense of development and these technologies, you develop these MVPs in a matter of hours. And I've witnessed this with the organizations where the team sits around the table, one person is behind the keyboard creating what people are brainstorming about.
[00:52:33.420] - Michael McCullough
Oh, absolutely. To that point, especially with project management, if you want to talk about bringing like real value. So a company that has not traditionally adopted PMI Penbo methodology, when you bring that in, you're still trying to tweak what are we going to use? How we're going to implement this. We can't just go out all willy nilly and buy some software suite that cost us a couple of hundred million dollars or whatever and then try to implement that without a good process. We need to kind of bring it in and slowly scale it up. One of the things that we were able to do is when we built those four apps and we scaled them, now, four years later, it's like, okay, hey, we have hit the limit of what we can do with this. Now we've brought that to it and said, hey, look, here's our working model, but we still need to do this.
[00:53:26.080] - Dalibor Ninkovic
This, and this and this.
[00:53:27.090] - Michael McCullough
Can you please work with us to find either a vendor or custom build a piece of software? Now we know we're going to get exactly what we want because we've done all the hard work and we brought them a working model of that.
[00:53:38.040] - PMO Joe
Yeah, this has been very enlightening for me. And of course, the challenge is time goes by so fast on these shows, we're having good discussion. We're down to about four or five minutes left, and I'll just pose 01:00 p.m. Industry Challenge Question but really, ultimately it's maybe something for a future show to think about because we probably won't have time to answer. It is. I think a lot of project managers skip over citizen developer because they don't view themselves as a developer. So it's an opportunity for someone else, right? It's not for me. So when I'm skimming the PMI page, I just move on to Wicked problem solving as opposed to that one because I don't make the connection because in my life, they've always been a team I've worked with, and I don't internalize that. That's something for me. So that's the one challenge I put out there. And what it will do is I always like to finish the shows by letting each of you kind of say, hey, is there anything that we didn't get to that we wanted to cover in the next minute or two for each of you? Maybe you can address that question or anything else you want.
[00:54:47.790] - PMO Joe
Bali again, we'll start with you on that.
[00:54:50.250] - Dalibor Ninkovic
Yeah, I mean, base just building on top of what Mike was just saying is a lot of the organizations nowadays are undergoing these, what they call digital transformation projects. That term means different things to different organizations. For some of them, it means just maintaining the old, upgrading the old systems. For some of them, it means building new or bringing in new systems. But in most of the cases, you'll find that a lot of organizations actually sit on top of these core systems, things like coraco Financials, SAP, et cetera, et cetera. So these core systems that are sitting there and they're not going anywhere, let's face it. I mean, these are the systems that the business depends on. But what we've discovered over the last few years is those systems don't actually address everything that the business needs. So I've had this case where the companies are using sets and development to build small apps that will serve particular groups of people, like suppliers or customers with a specific functionality on top of these systems. And what Mike was saying about getting pulling data from these different kind of data sources and different kind of systems into these apps that bring enormous business value.
[00:56:04.680] - Dalibor Ninkovic
So that for me, is one of the core kind of challenges nowadays where I see business sits and development kind of contributing. Now, just if I have a second, I just want to, like, address that question about project managers not being developers. Sits and development is not about being developers. Project managers are people who can bring seats and development and drive suits and development initiatives within the organization. They don't necessarily have to develop, but they can participate by bringing this kind of skills, these skills in terms of managing the risk and identifying applications and managing basically it's just a project, but it's a different kind of project. That's it for me.
[00:56:47.850] - PMO Joe
Awesome. Dali, thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate all of your insights and experiences. Matt, kind of parting thoughts, final thoughts from you as well?
[00:56:57.250] - Matt Hubbard
Yeah, it looks like we're a little short on time, so I'll try to do this in like 20 seconds. I'm going to plant the seed for maybe a future episode. I am a huge fanboy of what PMI has put together for citizen Developer, and my favorite part is their maturity model. It's five steps, and it begins with discovery, experimentation, adoption, scaling, and innovating. Okay. The reason I'm mentioning that is because some folks say, wow, this is a lot to digest, and I just don't have the time to strategize on picking the best low code platform for us and putting a whole program together. PMI's approach is saying, no, you don't do that until stage three. Start with discovery. Just get one person to get their feet wet with this, learn from it, and then try again with experimenting. We can talk about the whole maturity model later. I think it's a wonderful path that eases people into citizen development. Eases the entire company into citizen development.
[00:57:52.380] - PMO Joe
Awesome. Thank you so much. Matt, appreciate you rejoining us for this one. And michael same. Thank you for being on your final thoughts on anything last minute to share with everybody.
[00:58:02.650] - Michael McCullough
Absolutely, thank you for having me again. So I would say this. If you're thinking that system development is the cure all, it's something big to take in. No, as project managers, we don't live in perfect worlds. We have the variables, we have the things that pop up, the problems. No two projects are ever completely identical, and I challenge you to find those that are. Citizen development is just another tool in the toolbox that you have as a project manager to help drive those results to help get you to the Win category.
[00:58:41.460] - PMO Joe
Awesome.
[00:58:42.010] - Dalibor Ninkovic
Get it done.
[00:58:43.110] - PMO Joe
Well, thank you so much, all of you. I really appreciate it. Also, thank you to our listeners, right? We don't have a show if we don't have listeners, so it's great that we have an audience that likes to hear all of our guests and the insights that they bring. So thank you to them. Be sure to visit project Management office Hours website going out there to the PMO squad site. Hit Office Hours up on the top menu and you'll be able to get all 111 previous shows or of course, your favorite podcast platform. They're all out there as well. We're going to skip our next show in October because I'm going to be probably completely burned out from everything we're doing for the PMO Leader conference. Reminder to everybody, that's going to be on October 18. You can go out to the Pmoleader.com and you'll be able to register for that conference there. And so we'll be back in November 3 and we're going to be talking with our guests from the PMO Global Alliance. They have a healthcare strategic group that they're working with and we're going to get some insights and learn more about what they're doing.
[00:59:43.890] - PMO Joe
Reminder, of course, as I said, these shows are live, but we also do record them and we do release them as a podcast. So Project Management Office Hours is out there on Apple podcasts spotify. Spreaker, whatever your podcast platform of choice is, and of course, thank you to our sponsors, the PMO Squad and the PMO Leader. Without their support, none of this would be possible, so encourage everyone to go out and take a look at them on their website to see how they might be able to help you or your organization. That's it for now. Office Hours are closed until next time. I'm PMO Joe, and you've been listening to Project Management office hours.
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