Siemens Digital Industries Software

The low-code digital

transformation guide
Providing a road map for using Mendix
to launch a low-code initiative

siemens.com/software
2
Contents
Part 1
A new world 4 – 5

Part 2
The 4 Ps 6 – 7
Start, structure and scale 8 – 9
Influencing factors 10

Part 3
Let’s get making 11

People
Team position and organization 12 – 15
Team growth strategy 16 – 18

Portfolio
Identify the first applications to develop 19 – 21
Deliver your first application 22 – 23
Define value and begin to track it 24 – 25
Celebrate success 26

Process
Put governance structure in place 27
Establish a retrospective cadence 28

Platform
Standardize best practices and methodologies 29
Deployment strategy 30 – 31

Part 4
This is the beginning 32

References33

3
 A new world

The world is changing and the way you We have taken this experience and trans-
develop software needs to change with it. formed it into what you’re reading now: the
The key? Your entire organization. Start digital execution guide. With this, we guide
breaking down walls to clear space for your you through executing your organization’s
innovation factory. When we began our digital transformation strategy and mending
journey, we wanted to solve a problem that the rift between business and IT so you can
you and countless other businesses face every get back to what you’re good at: making.
single day: delivering software with tradi-
tional tools and techniques. The problem, What does it mean to make?
while easy to grasp, is massively complex. Making is delivering technology to enable and
The success rate of an enterprise-scale digital empower the makers and doers of today.
project is very slim, with 70 percent of proj- You’re a maker. You are leading your com-
ects either facing serious challenges or failing pany through a digital transformation. You’re
altogether.1 implementing massive changes to digitalize
your company and empower everyone in the
It’s all about collaboration. Or a lack thereof.
organization to be able to make applications.
Infrequent end user involvement often results
in unclear requirements. And unclear require- For your organization, you’ve been asking,
ments are harder to address and refine when “What’s next?” That answer is digital transfor-
development teams use processes that are mation, in which application delivery is
rigid and siloed. The result? A perfect storm of crucial. Long-cycle planning and lengthy
inefficiencies causing delayed projects application delivery cycles no longer support
fraught with issues. today’s customers’ needs and expectations.2
Whether it’s building or refining solutions that
We have made it our mission to help you
enhance engagement with your customers,
weather this storm. To do this, we needed to
resolving operational inefficiencies or driving
break down the walls between business and
new business, your applications are the key
information technology (IT) to reform the
value delivery mechanisms for your
way enterprises approach application devel-
organization.
opment. We aimed to connect people with
innovative ideas to the technology that would For digital transformation to truly take hold,
help them turn those ideas into a reality. you need to start asking, “What if?” What if
there was real collaboration between the
With low-code development, we’ve enabled
business and IT that enables your makers to
and fostered business collaboration in numer-
take their innovative ideas and deliver real,
ous organizations of all sizes across a range of
tangible results? What if there was a way to
industries and geographies. Harnessing years
let your people experiment, explore, build,
of research, development and a myriad of
develop, question and answer in a structured,
successful customers, we have become a
repeatable and scalable way? We have your
leader in low-code application development,
answer to, “What IF?”
supporting a community in the tens of
thousands.

4
 Part 1

Welcome to the innovation factory

The innovation factory is the critical juncture Unleash human capital
where exploration meets real actionable

The power of combining trends

results. It’s a process that uses constant and Microservices BizDevOps
choreographed collaboration to produce
• Autonomous apps • Collaboration between
enterprise-grade applications in an efficient,
• Implement business autonomous teams
predictable manner. It’s a scalable, self-sus-
functions • Owning full lifecycles
taining, organizational capability that enables
• Flexible core systems • Agile + DevOps
you to manufacture that IF.
The innovation factory is a combination of
our low-code technology and rapid applica- Cloud native
tion development methodology. Your
• Scalability
innovation factory’s foundation is built on a
• Re-usability of common services
convergence of three trends. Microservices
• Fully automated (cost effective)
are providing new ways to architect applica-
tions and infrastructure. Developers are freer
than ever to concentrate on the value an
application offers rather than focus on the
intricacies of a messy monolithic backend. Start here
Cloud-native deployment options provide Let us guide you through this new world of
opportunities for enterprises to be more digital transformation and arm you with the
scalable and agile because of its cost effec- know-how to enhance collaboration. We’ll
tiveness and the re-usability of common take you through the elements of digital
services. BizDevOps is a new way of collabo- transformation, and the key players and
rating across the entire development pieces that enact change in your application
lifecycle – including business users, develop- delivery process. Once you’re accustomed to
ers and operations – to ensure an application the elements and goals of digital execution,
is released quickly and accurately. we guide you step-by-step through building
the foundation of your innovation factory. We
The innovation factory enables a BizDevOps
also show you the Mendix tools that help you
approach and helps you establish a construc-
empower more people to create at scale,
tive and conscious common language
enable apps with smart technology and turn
centered around business needs, architecture
those ideas into reality.
and deployment to help you make applica-
tions at scale.
The elements of digital execution
When you begin your journey of digitalizing The innovation factory doesn’t start out of the
your business, you need a vision and a strat- blue. You need to build it from the ground
egy that gets you to the innovation factory so up. But before going into how you build your
you can unleash the creativity and ingenuity innovation factory, let’s get acquainted with
of your enterprise and enable makers in IT the different elements of your digital execu-
and the business to rapidly ideate, create and tion journey, the key drivers to unleashing
deploy apps at scale. your enterprise.

5
 The 4 Ps

Mendix has identified the core tenants of digital execution. These are the
4 Ps. Throughout this guide you’ll see that each P comes with its own set of
milestones and objectives, all driving toward the goal of building your
innovation factory.

People Portfolio
The people you choose to fill out your Mendix A successful rapid application development
team are absolutely crucial to the success of model is all about identifying the right proj-
your digital execution program. You need ects and creating a project portfolio of quick
more than just enterprise low-code develop- wins and high-value initiatives. Quick wins
ers on your team. allow you to realize immediate success and
create a wow factor, while high-value initia-
You want to find the right people with the
tives justify broader organizational change,
right skills, no matter their job title. Success
especially when the applications are tied to
starts at the top, where senior executive
relevant strategic initiatives. Mixing use cases
buy-in is a must. You need a program owner
is important to increase your portfolio flexibil-
to lead the program and mandate change.
ity in the later stages of digital execution, so
Architects are critical as well, because they
include new-market applications as well
will help establish a target architecture,
customer engagement and operational
infrastructure and governance. Product
efficiency.
owners are key players in a successful pro-
gram because they have in-depth knowledge
of the business, the product and its users and
will have insight into the value that it will
create. Finally, an application development
manager needs to spearhead the initiative
and drive the program as well as the cross-
functional teams that will deliver on those
projects.

6
 Part 2

Process Platform
Successful digital execution means changing As you hurtle toward digital execution, the
the way you work and establishing rapid rapid application development platform you
application development processes. Agile choose shouldn’t just be about new technol-
methodologies like Scrum are a good starting ogy trends like artificial intelligence (AI), big
point, splitting the work into sprints and data or blockchain, or whatever comes down
basing them on user stories, but you also the line. You need a platform that also helps
need to change from a traditional way of you improve operational efficiencies, reduce
development and operations into a BizDevOps time-to-market and foster collaboration
approach, speed up release cycles from between business stakeholders and IT:
quarterly to bi-weekly (sometimes even Something that addresses the present and
daily), and learn how to develop minimal prepares you for the future.
viable products (MVPs) with fast-paced,
Seek out a platform that helps you not only
follow-up iterations.
deliver faster, but more accurately, so you
can produce robust applications in a matter of
weeks. This is the fail-fast, learn-fast
approach.
The innovation factory requires going
through three major stages: start, structure
and scale. Each stage has its own unique set
of objectives, all with the aim of scaling up
your application development program.

7
 Start, structure and scale

Start
Innovation factory foundation
Establish first team, value and MVP

Structure
Formalized methodology and architecture
Get predictability and continuity

Scale
Scalable innovation factory
Continuously increase productivity and efficiency

Start Your objectives for the start phase:

If you need to build a mode of transportation
1. Deliver first value.
and you’ve never built such a thing before,
would you start by building a car or a skate- 2. Build and enable first team.
board? For most people out there, you’d
3. Develop and deliver first MVP.
probably start with the skateboard. It’s not
the car you want, but a skateboard gets you 4. UX design of the first app.
from point A to point B (albeit a little slower),
5. Begin architecture design.
with minimal relative effort. You’ve devel-
oped an MVP. This is what the start stage is.
Structure
Start is about laying the foundations for your If the start stage is about establishing and
innovation factory. In start, you develop proving the benefits of rapid application
applications that realize value quickly. The development, then structure is about building
reason for this is two-fold: out predictability and continuity. Structure is
about growing from your first set of apps to a
1. You’ll be spending more time building a
portfolio with more apps addressing multiple
team and putting the necessary prerequi-
use cases, expanding your first team into
sites in place in terms of infrastructure and
multiple teams and expanding your maker
process.
center. Structure is about taking the process
2. You want quick wins. Quick wins are of your first agile experience that you estab-
important because you’ll use these to lished in start to a process that institutes
prove the value of your new approach; shorter release cycles under strict gover-
you’ll want to celebrate your first success nance. In structure, you’re ready to move
and gain broader support around the from your first cloud deployment to a multi-
company. cloud deployment.

8
 Part 2

Structure is where you start to formalize your activated in such a way that you can shift
rapid application development process – them around the organization to work on
establishing an architecture, enabling projects where their skills are best put to use.
continuous delivery and creating governance. You are applying greater automation to your
By establishing predictability and stability, processes to efficiently and rapidly deliver
you’re building the scaffolding for the maker and manage hundreds of applications with
center. strategic impact. This includes automating
deployment and maintenance to support a
Your key objectives for the structure stage:
large portfolio, automating quality assurance
1. Formalizing your processes. to proactively monitor the maintainability of
your projects, and enabling greater re-usabil-
2. Building more apps and extending your
ity by establishing a private app store. With
portfolio use cases.
these capabilities in place, you maximize
3. Architecture design. value and productivity by creating distributed
innovation capabilities throughout the enter-
4. Advanced level development team.
prise. You have achieved continuous
5. Governance documentation. productivity and efficiency.
6. Automated testing. Your objectives during scale:
1. Talent portability.
Scale
From start to scale, learn how to use Mendix 2. Delivery velocity.
to speed up and scale out app development
3. Team efficiency.
and start delivering real value for your busi-
ness. Your talent has been trained and

9
 Influencing factors
Part 2

We’ve identified key influencing factors that can impact the success of your digital journey, laid out
across three levels of digital execution. Throughout this guide, we will highlight the influencing
factors to consider at key points of building your innovation factory. The icons you see in the image
below will let you know which key influencing factors to keep top of mind for that particular stage
and milestone.

Strategic level
This level is about evaluating and proving a strategic
impact, addressing transformation risk and identifying
resources to ensure success. In other words, it’s about
putting into place the pieces for establishing and maturing
a rapid application development vision. The key factors
here are: the right executive with the right vision, a wider The vision The organizational Use case focus
organizational footprint and expanding the portfolio to footprint and portfolio
include more applications across the different use cases.

Program level
The focus at the program level should be on achieving and
proving return-on-investment (ROI), a realization of the
benefits and communication. One of the key factors at this
level is the program owner who owns the Mendix program
and is leading change throughout the organization.
Another factor is the architect who is critical in connecting
the IT and business organizations and acts as what Gartner
calls a vanguard architect,3 one who establishes and
The program The architect ROI and budget
communicates architectural guidelines and guardrails. The
owner for change
third influencing factor is proving ROI because seeing is
believing. Without proving program value, it’s difficult to
expand your rapid application development capability that
you’re building.

Application level
The value focus at this level should be on time, cost and
quality. To ensure the success of these application-level
influencing factors, you need the right product owner
from the business; a collaborative, trained and Mendix
certified team; and to make sure that they’re delivering the
The product The team The app(s)
right application from both a technical- and business-value
owner delivery
point of view.

10
 Let’s get making
Part 3

It’s time to start laying down the foundation We’ve aligned each objective to the 4 Ps and
of your innovation factory. To do this, you’ll have listed out the milestones for each and
need to create your first Mendix team, estab- the ways to achieve those milestones. At the
lish processes and celebrate the successes end of each P, you’ll also receive the structure
you’ll achieve in the early parts of your digital milestones so you know how to not only lay
execution program. It’s all about firsts in the the groundwork for sale but start building
start stage: first value, first team, your first toward it.
MVP.

11
 Team position and organization

Before starting anything, you need the right people to make the first
application and portfolio, and to help you prove the value. We’ve created
the blueprint for building your first Mendix team, assessing that team and
showing how it can grow and collaborate with the business and other
departments within your organization.

Influencing factors

Program Organizational Product

Architect Team
owner footprint owner

Find problem solvers A who’s who

Find team members who care about solving It’s important to keep your team small as you
business problems (rather than people who build your innovation factory. With a small
prefer to build solutions based on detailed team, you can deliver new applications
requirements). There will be many obstacles quickly, avoiding much of the miscommunica-
to overcome due to existing processes and tion and delays that often come with larger
the culture of the business, so seek out peo- development teams. Smaller teams encour-
ple who have a can-do attitude. age productivity and creativity. Amazon chief
executive officer (CEO) Jeff Bezos’s “two-pizza
Look for the type of people who want to test
rule” states that you should never have a
their limits and have some technical profi-
meeting where two pizzas couldn’t feed the
ciency, but also understand business
entire group. The smaller the team, the more
challenges. A host of individuals that we’ve
room for brainstorming and peer review (and
seen successfully make the transition come
an extra slice of pepperoni for all).
from business analysis, UX, front-end web
design and business intelligence
Bashir Bseirani, CEO of Avertra, saw his
backgrounds.
team become more collaborative when
In the end, selecting the right team is the they started using Mendix because they
cornerstone of success, not just for your first could operate in a smaller team
project but for your entire rapid application environment. “Our philosophy is, we should
development program. be able to build an app with a team big
enough to eat one pizza. When Bezos
decided to do his two-pizza model, he
didn’t know about Mendix and he didn’t
know about the power of it.”

12
 Part 3 ⃒‌‌ People

A strong first Mendix team is more than someone with technical expertise, and together, bridging the gap between
just the number of people in the room. a business developer, someone familiar business needs and technical
Your first Mendix team should include a with the platform that can act as a possibilities.
core development team comprised of a power user if needed. The key is to have
combination of a professional developer, developers who can collaborate closely

A typical core team

Feedback Requests

Product Business Pro Specialized Tech

Visibility
owners developer developer capabilities specialists

The right team means the right product A Mendix certified developer is also One pitfall to avoid is assigning a differ-
owner. The product owner acts as a highly recommended to help the team ent team member for each project role.
stakeholder, someone who understands get trained on the Mendix platform. Each member can be responsible for
the value of the user stories and makes multiple roles. Instead of a formal
Some other team members to consider
sure the requirements are being met. structure, team members take on work
in the start phase are what we call
Your product owners are critical compo- based on their areas of expertise. For
accelerators. As an example, the UI/UX
nents of your success as a team. The example, you don’t need a dedicated
person makes the app look good but
right product owner needs to have a Scrum master for your first projects; the
also establishes a template ecosystem
vision of what you need to build, a solid lead developer can fill this role on top
for future applications. There’s also a
understanding of the users and market- of his or her existing development
need for an architect to establish guide-
place and a keen ability to prioritize tasks.
lines and think of the future state of the
backlog. Make sure they have the right
IT ecosystem.
authority to make decisions and engage
with the team daily.

Typical start stage

Trained engineers Accelerator

One product One lead/

owner Scrum master UX Architect

13
 Mendix developers come with all types of
skill sets
Developers come from all parts of the busi-
ness, not just IT. From hardcore programmers
and business-centric developers to tech-savvy
business analysts, low-code platforms let you
build teams of makers from all backgrounds.

Citizen Business Rapid Full stack

developer developer developer developer

Business developers IT developers

Mendix Studio Mendix Studio Pro Code extension

Business developers Pro developers Expert developers

“ Because the product owner sits right “ With Mendix, you have to think from
next to us, we can quickly get feedback the database model up and the
on what we’re developing, which relationships between entities and
makes it so much faster.” build upon that. When you can do that,
Jennifer Taylor you are thinking completely differently
Business Developer and understand the relationships. This
Innovapost
has made me a better developer.”
Evan Gagnier
Full Stack Developer
Granite Telecommunications

14
 Activate your team Giving your team the right tools will also take
It’s tempting to just focus on your new low- them far. The tools used by each person on
code platform at the start of your maker your team will differ, depending on their
center. In reality, it’s best to train your team technical acumen. A citizen developer,
on an agile development process, too, so they someone with limited or no programming
can collaborate effectively. This will make experience, can easily pick up Mendix using
learning the Mendix platform easier because Mendix Studio. Traditional developers will find
you’ll understand how it works. By observing themselves at home in Mendix Studio Pro.
an experienced Mendix developer in action,
your team learns how to effectively engage
business stakeholders and deliver better
solutions.
Another way of enabling your new Mendix
team is with training and certification. The
Mendix Academy offers three-day introduc-
tory courses and rapid developer certifications
to help upskill employees on how to rapidly
develop applications and use the Mendix
platform.
The most effective rapid application develop-
ment teams are onsite together, ideally
located with the product owner, working
through frequent iterations based on user
feedback. Your innovation factory is all about
enabling creativity to solve business chal-
lenges faster. By keeping your team close
together, you can keep the group excited and
motivated to continuously deliver and show
results.

“ People are always talking about solving “ We wanted to show how quickly a
problems with software, but I don’t project can get done with little to no
think it’s always problem-solving. You overhead using digital execution and
can add value to an existing process. really allowing developers to work with
Sometimes, we can just make it better.” free reign without the process wrapped
Yasmijn Joosten around it.”
Citizen Developer Russ Martin
Kuehne + Nagel Rapid Developer
Erie Insurance

15
 Team growth strategy

When building your team, you Option A: the centralized model

also want to build a team growth In this model, there are multiple product
owners who work with a Scrum master and
strategy so you can expand your directs multiple teams of developers who
rapid application development work on various types of apps.
program efficiently. There are a You also want to start creating and fostering
few options to do this. a talent pool from which you can quickly and
easily pull from in case a developer leaves the
team.

Accelerator Talent pool

Team A UX Mendix certified

Product
owner A

Architect Mendix certified

Team B
Product Lead/
owner B Scrum master A

OPS Mendix certified

Product Team C Quality assurance

owner C Mendix certified
(QA) and test

16
 Part 3 ⃒‌‌ People

Option B: the decentralized model The core team owns the application portfo-
This model requires you to have a core devel- lios, sets up architecture guidelines,
opment team consisting of a Mendix establishes best practices and ensures agile
engineer, an enterprise architect, designer, awareness across the business while the
Scrum master and professional developers. other units build their own portfolios. This
This group trains and enables the talent pool model also enables the business developers in
while deploying them from different business your organization. Thinking about future
units. state, this is where you start to scale out your
innovation factory.

Unit A (embedded in BU A)
Own BU
portfolio

EA/lead Designer Business Product Business Citizen Own “flex”

architect expert stakeholder owners developer developer portfolio

Unit A (embedded in BU A)
Own BU
portfolio

Test/Q&A Business Product Business Citizen Own “flex”

Scrum master
manage stakeholder owners developer developer portfolio

Unit A (embedded in BU A)
Own BU
portfolio

Business Product Business Citizen Own “flex”

Pro developer Team B
stakeholder owners developer developer portfolio

Talent pool Talent pool

Mendix Mendix Mendix Mendix

certified certified certified certified

17
 BizDevOps vision To do that, you can use the resources from
Much like a team growth strategy, we recom- the talent pool that you began cultivating in
mend also creating a BizDevOps vision for the start stage. And you can pick a team
your team. Rapid application development growth option that’s right for you and your
can work only as fast as the operations allow. business and start executing it.
You could build and deliver apps at the speed
of light, but they aren’t realizing value until Grow and split your teams
operations makes them go live. So, begin Your team in the start stage was purposefully
investigating what alignment between devel- small. As your apps become more complex
opment and operations looks like in your and gain more exposure, your team needs to
business. grow in proportion to that. Add an architect
and an UI/UX designer if they’re not already
Structure part of your team and add an operational
You want to take your team growth strategy engineer as well. Regardless of your team
and put it into action. Your objectives here growth strategy, you’ll be creating more
are about expanding your original team and teams as well, adding more business develop-
creating new ones. ers and product owners from across the
business.
Sourcing and enablement strategy:
You’ve read about who needs to be on your
Mendix Studio and Mendix Studio Pro cater to
first Mendix team. Take some time to con-
developers of all kinds. Because of this, you
sider people you work with that would be
can recruit developers from atypical places.
perfect for these roles. Consider people in
Go beyond your full-stack developers and try
and out of your business. When you invite
to find technically minded people from the
them onto your team, give them a token to
business who are focused on solving prob-
let them know they’re going to be working on
lems and making great things.
something very important and exciting.

18
 Identify the first applications
to develop Part 3 ⃒‌‌ Portfolio

It’s important that your first applications bring immediate You want word of your initial successes to spread like
value upon launch because rapid application development wildfire throughout the organization. Suddenly, you’ll have
isn’t about delivering rapidly, it’s about realizing value quicker colleagues banging at your door, saying things like, “I heard
than you have before. Remember: build fast, build right. you delivered that application in 30 days. How did you do
that? Will it work for my project?”
One project does not equal one application. We recommend
that you start with a portfolio of three applications. Although 3. Involve business stakeholders
the first success is always important, to truly grasp the new Requirements are often unclear and need to be refined
rapid application development process and the Mendix plat- through collaboration with, and feedback from, business
form, developing multiple apps and demonstrating repeated stakeholders. The goal is to illustrate the higher level of
success is a best practice. You have a new team with a new creativity and collaboration facilitated by this new rapid
way of working using new technology. Showing replicate application development approach.
success is important. Stick to application use cases that have
The key to involving business stakeholders lies with the role
low predefined requirements and a higher rate of change
of the product owner. The product owner knows what
(innovation, customer engagement, operational efficiency).
needs to be built. Applications are successful when the
We’ve developed a checklist of considerations to assist you in development team and product owner work together with
identifying the right applications for your first project. It’s a passion for making applications that deliver value. Limit
almost impossible to find projects that cover all eight consid- business involvement to a single department with your first
erations, so we’ve categorized them as must have, should applications. Too many people can hamper your team’s
have and nice to have. ability to make decisions quickly.
4. Ensure a desire to take the applications into production
Influencing factors Another important consideration is that you can take the
applications into production. Doing this gives you a clearer
picture of the time-to-market advantage. As an aside,
starting with a prototype might lead others to believe this
approach is only suitable for prototyping, which is under-
selling the impact.
Use case focus App(s)
and portfolio delivery For instance, a Mendix customer built a customer self-
service portal in six weeks, only to discover a week
before go-live their biggest competitor launched a
Must have mobile app. They pushed the application to production
1. Go live quickly and within two weeks added mobile functionality while
One of the main goals of your first application is to vali- the initial version was delivering value. Rapid
date your ability to rapidly bring new ideas to market. application delivery gives you the ability to pivot quickly
and address changes in the market in a matter of weeks.
It’s important that you identify quick wins that can go live,
typically in 30 days. Select applications that are limited in
5. Limit dependencies
scope and can stand alone in production.
To deliver applications in as little as 30 days, limit your
2. Make them worthy applications’ external dependencies. External factors over
Your first applications should also be highly visible within which you have little or no control can quickly diminish the
the organization. They must have the right urgency and productivity advantage offered by the Mendix platform.
executive support, as well as deliver tangible business That’s like using a permanent marker on a brand-new
value. Select applications that you’re sure the results will whiteboard.
get noticed and your success will be shared by
stakeholders.

19
 Some dependencies to avoid: The process of getting from idea to pro-
duction is traditionally a lot of work, so
• Integration with existing systems,
when the people across the business see
particularly those where application
an idea come to fruition in just 30 days,
programming interfaces (APIs) aren’t
they will be amazed.
defined
• Deployment infrastructure. It’s not Matt Rogers, chief information officer
uncommon at large companies to wait (CIO) of Suez UK, a waste management
two months for the required hardware. company, looked for a way to quickly
For this reason, deploy your first appli- address gaps in his portfolio. Using
cation in the Mendix Cloud. With Mendix, he and his department were
one-click deployment, you’re able to able to do so: “Where we have gaps in
remove all friction from the deployment
our architecture, or gaps in our
process
application portfolio, low-code enables
• Industry regulations. Often, external us to build them very quickly and bring
regulations can make for unclear them to market.”
requirements, which can lead to delays
7. Make failures into wins
6. Don’t get bogged down in requirements
It’s ok to admit defeat. In this case, it’s
Digital innovation projects are often
beneficial. It may sound contradictory, but
marked by unclear business requirements.
good first applications are often ones that
Don’t worry; this is a good thing because it
your organization previously failed to
is better to define a high-level goal or
deliver.
purpose versus having detailed require-
ments. The more requirements your first For instance, a Mendix customer initially
applications have upfront, the longer it’s failed to build an application that calcu-
going to take to release. Make sure that lates prices because the algorithm was so
you have at least two follow-up iterations specific to the business, and the .NET
planned so you can capture and refine developer couldn’t grasp all the nuances.
requirements and build trust with the Using Mendix, business stakeholders and
business stakeholders. This shows them IT developers were able to take that failure
that even if their requirements don’t make and turn it into a winner, collaborate much
it into the initial MVP, they will come in the more closely and successfully deliver a first
next versions. version of the application in a few days.

20
8. Make them smart Level of complexity
To ensure that apps deliver the best pos-
sible experience to the user, they should
Low complexity, High complexity,
be intelligent, contextual and proactive –
high exposure high exposure
for example, smart. Develop an app that
• Customer facing • Customer facing
could use AI to personalize a user’s experi-
• Multi-channel • Multi-channel
ence or uses geolocation to let you know
• Limited integrations • Heavy usage
the location for the cake you ordered for
• High availability,
your big app launch party.
disaster recovery
As you progress from the start to the struc- • Service-oriented
ture phase, the looser these guidelines architecture (SOA)
become. For example, you can select applica- • Goal and requirements

Level of exposure
tions with multiple integration points, or start to be discovered
to work on applications that have more
predefined requirements. By picking the right
applications you will illustrate several impor-
Low complexity, low High complexity,
tant things:
exposure low exposure
1. You can release applications to market in • Internal users • Complex integrations
an unprecedentedly short time. • Value driver: efficiency • Business critical
• Well defined goal and • Heavy data load
2. Business and IT can effectively collaborate
requirements • Internal users
to deliver new innovations.
• Goal and requirements
3. You can achieve results with fewer available
resources (small teams, low cost).
4. You are able to work with agile processes
and feedback cycles.
5. Your new approach is a repeatable process,
not a one-off success.
6. You will show continuous improvement
using a fail-fast, learn-fast approach.

The complexity matrix Take a minute to review the eight consider-

Using the complexity matrix is a great way to ations and use the checklist below to start
assess the right projects for your start stage thinking about and writing down the first
portfolio. Exposure is the amount of usage or applications you’re going to make with
availability an application has. Complexity can Mendix:
be defined as how technically complex is the
• Go live quickly
application; for example, how many integra-
tions does the application require? You want • Make the apps worthy
to start on the left-hand side of the quadrant,
• Involve business stakeholders
which represents your team learning and
feeling comfortable with the new way of • Ensure a desire to take the applications
working. into production
• Limit dependencies
• Don’t get bogged down in requirements
• Make failures into wins
• Make them smart

21
 Deliver your first application

You’ve carefully selected your team and thoughtfully selected This type of interaction will help create a different attitude
your projects. Now it’s time to deliver. Agile methodologies towards IT and set the stage with the rest of the organiza-
like Scrum are a good starting point and a critical component tion. Although this workshop alone won’t transform your
of digital execution, but not all Scrum principles work for all organization, it gets the business to think, “This just might
organizations. Also, if the business is unwilling or unpre- work.” That is a victory upon which you can build.
pared, the effort is in vain. You need to prepare the business
2. Kickoff workshop
for rapid, iterative development, which is why the selection
of a product owner is important. You cover several topics in the kickoff workshop:
• Assigning project roles and responsibilities
At Zurich insurance, senior product underwriter, Alex
Tong, was a critical player in Zurich’s inaugural DevOps • Formulating a high-level delivery plan
team’s first application with Mendix. Tong gave the • Creating agile awareness and a lean governance
DevOps team a deep understanding of a data-capturing approach
application that helped the underwriting process. Working
together, Tong and the DevOps team were able to produce • Sharing strategic business goals
an underwriting app that’s saving Zurich underwriters • Defining clear rules of engagement
days’ worth of time, allowing them more time for quoting
Instead of assigning technical roles, give people full own-
and building business.
ership of their user stories and divide the work based on
those. Thanks to the Mendix Studio and Medix Studio Pro,
Agility is crucial to rapid application development because it
business developers can do most of the work themselves.
brings an iterative, team-based approach to software devel-
Then, when necessary, you can bring fly-in experts for
opment. Rapid application development teams deliver
specific technical issues like integration or performance
components of an application in sprints, time-boxed phases
tuning. Using project management tools like Jira or Sprintr
with defined durations and a finite list of deliverables
can help manage the user story-based work.
planned at the start. Collaboration is key to an agile
approach. Once you have defined the new rules of engagement,
work out the first 10 to 20 user stories as a team. Go
Here are some guidelines to ensure a successful delivery
through the exercise of having one person write a user
of your first application with rapid application
story and someone else interpret it. This helps to create a
development:
shared vocabulary and understanding, including a defini-
1. Intake workshop tion of ready that indicates when the team collectively
feels a user story is ready for development.
This workshop is where the real collaboration begins. The
purpose of the intake workshop is to define the project As a last step, prioritize the user stories for the first devel-
business goal – not what you want to build, but what you opment sprint. Mendix provides APIs that connect tools
want to achieve. The meeting should include the following and services to the Mendix platform. We recommend that
people: you try to do all the work in Mendix first before integrating
with a third-party tool or service. When you start to include
• The project sponsor, or the leader of digital transforma-
those, you start to increase dependencies, which is what
tion initiative, who can articulate the strategic value of
you want to limit in the start phase.
the new approach
• The product owner, who can describe the problem the
application should address
• Mendix power users, a subset of end users, to enable
the definition of requirements for the first sprint and
who have a firsthand knowledge of the organization’s
challenges and needs

22
 Part 3 ⃒‌‌ Portfolio

3. Run short sprints Mendix Studio Pro enables you to adopt an agile approach
based on Scrum. With capabilities like sprints, story man-
Scrum typically calls for two-to-four week sprints. With
agement and integrated feedback management, you can
longer sprints, there’s always a threat of not going live.
easily get an agile shop up and running in a single environ-
The faster you go live, the faster you can realize value.
ment. More importantly, you can start bridging business
A traditional development approach suggests waiting for and IT and start developing apps that bring real value.
feedback at the end of the sprint. With longer sprints,
Holding shorter sprints helps a team that is learning not
assumptions made by developers can negatively affect the
only how to collaborate with each other and across the
latter end of the sprint when you finally demo the applica-
organization, but also how to estimate the complexity of
tion because developers are not eliciting feedback early
the user stories they need to build. As the app begins to
and often enough. When mistakes build up and aren’t
take shape, you can move to two-week sprints.
addressed until the end of the sprint, this causes applica-
tion development to slow down. Mendix Studio Pro provides several tools to enable real-
time, business-IT collaboration:
An important aspect of collaboration is listening. Bringing
in the business and asking for their feedback throughout • The developer portal – Includes stories page that lets
the development process tells the business that not only you add and edit sprints, and a social tool called Buzz
are they being heard, but you’re able to listen and incorpo- that enables stakeholders post updates, make com-
rate feedback remarkably quickly. Make sure to allocate ments and upload documents
time to process user feedback.
• The feedback and collaboration widget easily elicits and
The Mendix visual modeling lets the business see what receives feedback from all involved with the project.
you’re building; they don’t need to look under the hood Beyond making comments, you can get feedback in
and at the code to understand. This is a huge factor in real-time with the edit, view and share functions
collaborating and engagement. Allocating time for feed-
• APIs – Connect Mendix with third-party tools and
back will help the business feel for the first time they are
services
truly involved in the creation process.
4. First sprint review meeting Demo each sprint
Systems design can be an abstract exercise. To make sure
In each sprint review meeting, but particularly the first, it
your developers are on the same page with your product
is critical to show a good working demo.
owners and vice versa, your product owner needs to be
• Show how you solve business problems. Don’t just demon- sitting with your developers and establishing a common
strate features; tie the demo back to the business objec- language among them. With Mendix Studio and Mendix
tives and challenges shared at the onset of the project Studio Pro, you can remove abstraction. Model-driven
development and real-time collaboration allow you create
• Make sure the user interface (UI) looks good. Users will
a common, shared language among your Mendix team –
judge the book by its cover, even early in the develop-
developers and product owners alike. Rather than just talking
ment process. Make sure they don’t tune out because
about a function, a developer can easily show it in action and
you have underinvested in the UI
get immediate feedback on it.
• Use good demo data. The data needs to be representa-
tive so the demo feels real to business users. They will
start to get excited with the impact of the new solution.
The Mendix Atlas UI is an open source and extensible
design framework that brings good user experiences to
your applications. Atlas UI gives your user interfaces a
simplicity, consistency and responsiveness to allow you to
brand your apps and make them usable across a range of
devices.

23
 Define value and begin to track it

Your applications should be doing a combination of three

things for your company: Influencing factors

1. Creating new products and business models

Apps can help you enable strategic programs that aid in
reaching business objectives like launching new business
models, entering new markets and staying ahead of your
competition. ROI and budget
Program owner The vision
2. Enhancing customer engagement for change

Apps that create new products or services that attract new

customers or enhance an existing product to prevent
churn. Keep them coming back for more. When you’re assessing the value of your application portfolio,
consider how fast you’re bringing your applications to market
3. Increasing operational efficiencies (time-to-market), how fast you’re building those applications
Apps that help you decrease operational and IT costs with (application velocity) and how much time and money you’re
process automation and infrastructure improvements. saving in development (cost of development).

Start Core value drivers

Increase time-to-market speed Increase application velocity Lower cost of development

Traditional
Hours for development
Live
and maintenance
Start

$$$

Cost per hour

RAD
Live

Infrastructure
$$$

Traditional RAD

The higher the potential value of your application, the greater

the unpredictability. That is, an application designed to
reduce costs has more predictable value than one that helps
you enter a new market. You can use the previously men-
tioned complexity matrix to help you define the value of your
products. Or you can create a use case with the program
owner that describes the current state of affairs and offers a
description of the application idea.

24
 Part 3 ⃒‌‌ Portfolio

Start to build your digital use case

Use our digital use case template to start
assessing the value of your project. The use
case should talk about what the application
is, what it’s solving or creating and the key
performance indicators (KPIs) to help assess
its success.

Data capture application (B2B) ⊠

Current situation
Poor data quality...........................................................................................................
Too much time spent on manual data input....................................................................
No splash......................................................................................................................

Description of the idea (“we believe”)

....................................................................................................................................
We believe that this new app can improve data quality and automate data capture .........
....................................................................................................................................

What will it solve/create? Affected KPIs? Enabled by:

......................................... ........................................ ......................................
reduce time to capture data, ........................................ Mendix Studio, makers,...
increase data integrity, ..... ........................................ ingenuity........................
a big splash........................ ........................................ ......................................
......................................... ........................................ ......................................

25
 Celebrate success
Part 3 ⃒‌‌ Portfolio

Your initial applications will be a catalyst for change through- developers certified through the Mendix Academy. Take the
out the organization. To ensure the organization knows governance strategy we discuss later and put it into action.
about the successes of the apps and understands their value,
you need to celebrate success. Portfolio/use case mix of rebuild, ideation and
components
When you celebrate success, you create awareness for the
In start, you’ve selected your first projects, delivered them
value you’ve delivered and what it means for other individu-
and received many accolades. In structure, you want to
als and departments across your organization. Celebration
expand your use cases and start increasing your output. To
drives executive sponsorship, establishes broader support,
do this, express an “application ambition.” This is your state-
and attracts new talent. According to McKinsey, involvement
ment of intent for growing your portfolio. List out how many
from company leaders is critical. “Companies with CEO spon-
apps you want to create, which use case they fall under and
sors are twice as likely to be high performers as companies
start to estimate their value.
whose CEOs are not directly engaged in digital.”4
Think about the key pieces of information you’d show off
People like to be associated with success and when they see
during your application launch celebration: Here are some
it, they will quickly want to be a part of it.
starters:
Here are some tips to maximize the impact of your
1. Why you started making this app.
internal celebration:
2. The app’s key performance indicators (KPIs).
• Throw a party and invite as many people as possible, not
just your development team. Host the party in a central 3. Your journey to building the app.
location so other departments take notice.
4. How the app has performed against those KPIs.
• People love cake. To be more specific: people love free
5. Key takeaways.
cake. Order a cake. One of our customers in the shipping
industry made their cake look like a shipping container
because their app increased the utilization of their contain-
ers. You could make your cake look like a volcano, because
business is about to erupt.
• Make sure your most senior sponsor is in the room to
reinforce the importance of low-code development.
• Captivate your audience by presenting the astonishing
results of your project. Have the business show the demo.

Structure
Portfolio in the structure stage is about expanding the num-
ber of apps in your portfolio, their use cases and their
complexity.

Move to high-complexity apps

In structure you want to move to the right in the complexity/
exposure matrix. Only after you’ve established repeated
success and consistent delivery velocity should you move to
the upper right quadrant. This is a gradual approach.

Crawl, walk, then run

Make sure your team is ready to take on more complex apps.
Train them and get them to be rapid and advanced

26
 Put governance
structure in place Part 3 ⃒‌‌ Process

A core element to success is repeating it. Repeated success

leads to and informs your governance around rapid applica- Influencing factors
tion development. You need to define and implement
processes and rules around application development that
help you coordinate and control your application portfolio.
Governance is creating a centralized hub where you establish
best practices around agile and Scrum, UI/UX and guidelines Program The vision Architect App(s)
around build, deployment and architecture. You’re assigning owner delivery
the people on your team responsibilities around these best
practices.

27
 Establish a retrospective
cadence Part 3 ⃒‌‌ Process

To achieve this milestone, it’s first important to establish the

goals of a retrospective. The retrospective should look back
on the project and review successes and lessons learned.
1. Did the project achieve its business goal?
2. Did you have the right people on the team?
3. How well was the business engaged in the process?
Embrace all feedback, whether it’s perception or reality.
Again, let the business know they have a voice and their
input is vital to improving future projects. Seek their advice
on how to develop a more structured rapid application devel-
opment approach that further enhances engagement and
collaboration with other business units.
One of the most important questions to ask the business
stakeholders in the retrospective is, “What would you tell your
friends/colleagues about this project to make them enthusias-
tic?” This elevator pitch is great fodder for internal feedback,
with the goal of implementing this approach more broadly
across the organization. To effectively engage the business,
you may have to reverse years of perception. The key is
constant communication and proof. Once business users see
that you have done what you said you would do – and they
can have a significant impact on the project – they will
quickly embrace this new approach.
Try framing your next retrospective around these
questions:
Onboarding
We’ve talked about the people-focused milestones already, 1. What did you like?
but onboarding is a people-centric milestone that falls
2. What did you learn?
squarely into the process aspect of start stage. You’ve
selected your team, but you have to give them time to learn 3. What did it lack?
on the job. Making mistakes and experimenting with differ-
4. What did you long for?
ent tools and processes is going to help you learn what works
and what doesn’t work for your rapid application develop-
Structure
ment process.
You’ve established that it works, now it’s time to codify that
What you learn during onboarding can also help inform your success: The process milestones in structure center around
governance strategy, so be sure to record not just your suc- standardizing best practices and creating governance around
cesses in the start stage, but your missteps as well. the technical aspects of rapid application development.

28
 Standardize best practices
and methodology Part 3 ⃒‌‌ Platform

This is what we like to call functional governance. Here you High-level positioning
are capturing the many different processes that you’ve used High-level positioning is about knowing how and where
successfully to then share with others and refer back to. Mendix fits in with the rest of your IT ecosystem. Use the
Capturing the milestones of the 4 Ps – your ideation process, start stage to experience the benefits of instant provisioning,
release cycle, agile collaboration methods and how you not just of the application environment, but all the software
ensure quality – are all processes that should have best needed to support the entire lifecycle, from project manage-
practices set around them. ment to repositories. Learning more about how easy it should
be to deploy and operate apps shows how developers can do
To gain a better understanding of your successes, make sure
this and help your innovation factory achieve continuous
when you’re closing your learning loops and going through
productivity and efficiency.
the feedback process you and your team start to include
lessons-learned with your retrospectives. This will help define
and build your rapid application development playbook in the
structure stage. Influencing factors

Establish a governance plan

If the above milestone is about functional governance, this
milestone is about technical governance. The governance
plan you were visualizing at the start stage should be up and
running at this point. Set up guidelines and rules around Program Organizational Architect
architecture, testing/QA and deployment to ensure your owner footprint
process continues to run smoothly even with more people
and more complex applications.

29
 Deployment strategy

The start stage is an excellent time to start exploring the But as you expand your portfolio and move from start to
cloud and use this knowledge as input for strategic choices in structure, you will need to consider other deployment options
the future. You’re most likely going to deploy your applica- and moving to a multi-cloud environment. Understanding the
tion on the Mendix cloud because it’s the most optimized cloud environments to which you’ll deploy – for example, the
cloud to run Mendix built applications. Built on top of Cloud security features and how they fit into your existing security
Foundry and AWS, the Mendix Cloud is the deployment framework – will help inform how you move to structure.
solution in which Mendix provides hosting environments for
you. It’s available globally and comes standard with deep
insights, alerting capabilities, high availability options and
backups.

Run in the cloud

30
 Part 3 ⃒‌‌ Platform

Mendix applications run on the platform’s cloud-native, Structure

stateless runtime architecture that conforms to the 12-Factor You’ve established deployment and integration strategies,
App principles with support for modern cloud platforms such now it’s time to execute. The structure objectives of the
as Docker, Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry. Mendix applica- platform are about developing re-usable components and
tions provide auto-scaling, auto-provisioning, auto-healing, expanding out to a multi-cloud strategy.
low infrastructure overhead, continuous integration and
continuous deployment and cloud interoperability, all Develop re-usable components
out-of-the-box. A successful move from start to structure means developing
re-usable components to save time later in the development
With the Mendix platform, you can package and deploy cycle. You need to first establish a re-usable component
your applications to the cloud provider of your choice with strategy and define how they are used, maintained and
one-click deployment. This feature automatically creates where they’re stored. Assign a development team to solely
the appropriate deployment package (like Docker or Cloud work on re-usable components. This team will be in charge of
Foundry) and supports the creation of build packs for not only creating but maintaining the components as well.
on-premises or infrastructure-as-a-service deployments. This team should store the components in the enterprise app
store.

Data and integration strategy Deployment strategy

Similar to your deployment strategy, you also want to begin In start, you used Mendix cloud to deploy your first set of
considering what your data and integration strategy looks projects. But as you grow your teams and expand into mul-
like with Mendix and the rest of your IT ecosystem. You need tiple business units, you need to start considering a
to consider your architecture strategy, too. This is an oppor- multi-cloud strategy.
tunity for that vanguard architect you elected to come in and
understand what architecture works best for your develop- Although it was tempting to think about using Mendix Studio
ment program. and Mendix Studio Pro in their entirety form the start, you
chose to focus on the people and process. You’ve got some
Part of building a successful innovation factory is moving amazing first results and some great takeaways that prove
away from a monolithic architecture to a microservices setup. your organization can adopt a new way of working.
Your vanguard needs to investigate if microservices is right
for your business and evaluate its benefits (hint: it is right for You’ve successfully laid the foundation to your innovation
your business). factory. You’ve hit the milestones for each of the 4 Ps and
have:
Microservices are a historical improvement in the way we
design, build and manage IT assets. To us, there’s no more 1. Delivered your first value.
productive combination than a microservices architecture and 2. Built and enabled your first team.
using a low-code platform.
3. Developed and delivered your first MVP.
Small, autonomous DevOps teams use microservices to
produce deployable components that fulfill a business func- 4. Designed UX for your first app.
tion autonomously. Use microservices to model your IT 5. Begun your architecture design.
landscape closer to the way a business is run. This not only
better bridges the gap between IT and business stakeholders, Take a moment to admire your work and think about next
but also can drastically improve flexibility and steps. Remember, the key to moving from start to structure is
time-to-market.5 not success but repeating it. Repeated success shows that
you’ve ironed out any wrinkles in the process, smoothed out
Moving to the cloud and microservices in conjunction with any kinks in your first team and showcased the value you’ve
using Mendix can help you realize application development realized from your portfolio.
velocity increase by five or 10 times.

31
 This is the beginning
Part 4

The real work is just starting. Taking your company from Use the steps we’ve laid out in this guide so you, your team,
being digitally disrupted to digitally innovative is not done your business stakeholders – your entire organization – are
in a day. Now you are armed with the know-how to go out empowered to answer, what if? You’re ready build the impos-
and successfully digitize your organization. You’re moving sible. You’re ready to create the exceptional.
forward with a new, collaborative way of working. Soon you
and your team will be building amazing things.

32
 References

1. “2016 IDC futurescape CIO agenda prediction 4,” Bill

Keyworth, IDC.
2. “Faster software delivery will accelerate digital transforma-
tion,” Forrester, 4/12/2018. www.forrester.com/report/
Faster+Software+Delivery+Will+Accelerate+Digital+
Transformation/-/E-RES116443
3. “Vanguard and foundational enterprise architects must
collaborate on a bimodal technology architecture,”
Cathleen Blanton, Gartner, 10/26/2015.
4. “Cracking the digital code,” Holley Bughin, et al. McKinsey
and Company, 9/2015.
5. “How microservices and DevOps help CIOs realize business-
IT alignment,” Andreas Lennevi, Mendix, 1/10/2018.
www.mendix.com/blog/microservices-devops-help-cios-
realize-business-alignment

33
About Siemens Digital Industries Software
Siemens Digital Industries Software is driving
transformation to enable a digital enterprise where
engineering, manufacturing and electronics design
meet tomorrow. Xcelerator, our comprehensive and
integrated portfolio of software and services from
Siemens Digital Industries Software, helps companies
of all sizes create and leverage a comprehensive digital
twin that provides organizations with new insights,
opportunities and levels of automation to drive
innovation. For more information on Siemens Digital
Industries Software products and services, visit
siemens.com/software or follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter,
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Software – Where today meets tomorrow.

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