Creating a Getting Started Plan

Introduction

Creating a Getting Started Plan

In this section, you will learn why and how to create an effective getting started plan. By the end, you will be able to:

• Define your low-code vision based on best practices.
• Explain the possibilities and importance of creating a getting started plan.
• Explain the importance of portfolio management to your stakeholders, and start working with them to identify the best ideas.
• Start populating your portfolio with initial ideas.
• Choose your first app.
• Define the value and purpose of your first app.
• Identify the most suitable deployment option for your Mendix app.
• List the different development options and choose the right one for your organization.

Creating or Revising Your Low-Code Vision

A clear vision for low-code development in your organization is critical to the success of your low-code change initiative because it takes the guesswork out of people trying to understand what you want to achieve. This vision should reflect your company’s culture, but should also be aligned and contribute to other visions, values, strategies, and initiatives that are already in motion in your organization.

There is a wide variety of ideas and opinions regarding the length, form, structure, and scope of a vision. We have compiled a set of guidelines and recommendations to help you in defining your vision. If you have already defined it, now is the perfect time to revisit it, and make sure you are happy with it.

Preparation

Reference company documents and talk to your team and other key stakeholders on the business and technology side.

This ensures alignment and contribution to other visions, values, strategies, and initiatives that are already in place in your organization. We have included a list of useful questions to consider in the supporting content available at the beginning of this section.

First iteration: Mind map/Brainstorming

Start exploring the areas that you want to transform. Mendix recommends keeping in mind the 5 P’s, because thy cover all the aspects you need when undergoing a transformation. This also ties well into other tools we use, such as the Maturity Assessment.

Imagine how you want those areas to look like in 3 - 4 years. That timeframe is the perfect balance between realistic and achievable, and it gives you the chance to work on different aspects simultaneously.

Add keywords to a mind map for each of the five areas.

Second iteration: Prioritizing and Adding Details

Select the most important ideas and create full sentences as bullet points, adding details so that anyone reading the sentence can understand what it means.

You can also start adding key results or placeholders for them, such as “Achieve an ROI of [amount] by [date]”.

Third iteration: Evaluating and Refining

Review and refine your bullet points. You need to ensure that you can evaluate whether a particular point has been completed or achieved.

Finish adding relevant key results or placeholders. You may choose to leave the actual numbers in the key results blank and ask your teams or key people in your organization to set the ambition levels themselves. This creates ownership and buy-in to your vision.

Once you have full sentences for all bullet points and the relevant key results, you need to review them all, asking yourself whether they are ambitious enough or too ambitious. The objectives need to be achievable while also challenging.

Socializing Your Vision and Gathering Feedback

Show your draft vision to key stakeholders and a selection of employees to get their feedback.

Check during this refining stage that people understand the vision, and that it accurately represents what you want to achieve and what your organization needs.

Writing Your Final Version

In this final stage, you need to consider what feedback is relevant and what you want to incorporate.

You might want to get support from a writer to make sure your message is clear and it resonates with your team and stakeholders.

Communicating Your Vision Effectively

Once you have your vision, you need to communicate it effectively to your team, ensuring that everyone understands it.

You may choose to do so in town halls or an all-hands, as well as through videos that can be shown asynchronously.

Building Your Getting Started Plan

First, work with stakeholders to align your start stage goals and key challenges. These goals should be focused on what success looks like for your team and how to measure it. Goals could be something like “At the end of Q3, we will have at least two apps live”, or “We want to generate X in ROI with our first app”. The start stage is all about bringing together your first team, building, deploying, and celebrating your first apps, while defining a future portfolio vision. Keep your start stage goals related to these topics, but customize them based on what you want to achieve. You should consider your low-code vision as the future state you are working toward, then break that into digestible goals for your getting started plan.

After you’ve established your goals, think about the challenges that might get in your way and then build a mitigation plan to avoid those.

Now that you have your goals and challenges identified, consider milestones for each of the 5 P’s as part of your getting started plan. Here are some ideas:

• Portfolio

  • First app identified
  • App value definition completed
  • First app live
  • Portfolio defined

• People

  • First team trained
  • Training and enablement plan defined
  • Team growth strategy defined

• Process

  • Governance strategy defined
  • Mendix support introduced
  • Stage retrospective executed

• Platform

  • Deployment strategy defined
  • Data and integration strategy defined
  • Architecture strategy defined

• Promotion

  • Host a go-live celebration for your first app
  • Gather relevant stakeholders to show progress
  • Share the success at a company meeting or in newsletters

The final step of your getting started plan involves capturing your 5 P’s milestones and building a timeline. Work independently or work with your customer success manager to think through what this might look like for you.

These image contain examples of timelines that Mendix uses frequently.

Starting Your Mendix Portfolio

Portfolio Management is a top-down process led by a portfolio manager and by decision makers. Its main purpose is to assess potential initiatives and ensure they align with business goals. Initiatives that don’t meet criteria are excluded from consideration.

To make sure that the strategy is reflected in the initiatives, you need to put in place a program to ensure alignment at every level, across every department. At this level, program owners or managers enable collaboration across departments. This ensures that every solution will always meet the criteria, and support the goals of the vision.

Portfolio Management starts at the company level, where the strategy is defined. The company strategy leads to a Portfolio Vision, which is translated into a backlog and budget for all initiatives.

If you have not already created your portfolio, you can start by thinking of the goals that your organization wants to achieve. These could include solutions to migrate from legacy apps, improve customer experience, or increase efficiency.
Follow these steps:

1. Access Portfolio Management.

2. Click Open Portfolio Management.

3. Click Create Portfolio. You can make it restricted for the time being, which means that you have to approve other people before they gain access to it.
   You can import ideas from an Excel file.

4. Click Create Initiative on the top right, and start jotting down your ideas.

Choosing Your First App

We recommend that you start by adding at least three app ideas to your portfolio, and picking one based on this checklist:

• Go live quickly — One of the main goals of your first app is to validate your ability to rapidly bring new ideas to market. Therefore, Mendix recommends selecting an app that is limited in scope and can work independently in production.
• Keep visibility in mind — Your first app should be highly visible within the organization. It must have executive support, and also deliver tangible business value.
• Involve business stakeholders — Requirements are often unclear and need to be refined through collaboration with, and feedback from, business stakeholders.
• Limit dependencies — Avoid external factors over which you have little or no control. They can quickly diminish the productivity advantage offered by the Mendix platform.
• Start with high-level requirements — It is a good idea to start with a high-level goal rather than having detailed requirements. Then, have at least two follow-up iterations so that you can capture and refine requirements.
• Do not get discouraged by failure — Good first apps are often ones that your organization previously failed to deliver. They teach you how to learn from mistakes and how to collaborate better.
• Create a smart app — To ensure that it delivers the best possible experience, the app should be intelligent, contextual and proactive. Develop an app that uses AI to personalize a user’s experience.
• Apply the complexity matrix — Using the complexity matrix is a great way to assess the right projects for your Start stage portfolio.
  Exposure is the amount of usage or availability of an app.
  Complexity stands for how technically complex an app is, such as how many integrations it requires.

• Think of the projects that Mendix is a good fit for — Mendix fits a wide variety of software apps, but some really stand out as a perfect fit:

  • Any software requirement where there is no readily available solution
  • Software projects where the requirements are not very clear yet, and the business requires flexibility during the development process
  • Software projects where a high degree of business involvement is expected during the development process
  • Situations where the customer wants to build multiple apps and they want to benefit from reusing components
  • Apps that span multiple channels, such as desktop, mobile, and tablet
  • Workflow apps
  • Customer-facing apps that need to be visually perfect
  • Apps that require the flexibility to start small and be scaled up
  • Apps that require governance, with audit and traceability built in the platform
  • Projects where resources are scarce
  • Apps that the customer wants to maintain and support themselves
  • Projects where changes after release are likely to happen
  • Internal work portals
  • Process-oriented apps
  • Integration apps
  • Apps that require data management
  • Apps that replace Excel apps
  • Apps that have integrations with other platforms and systems
  • Projects that will replace a legacy app
  • Any new solutions where the data will also be stored in the app
  • Extensions of System of Record, such as ERP, PLM, and MES

  These are projects where Mendix would not be a perfect fit:

  • Games, as as Mendix is aimed at building business apps
  • Content Management Systems, although Mendix can integrate well with existing CMS for creating CMS portals
  • Data warehouse apps, although Mendix can integrate well with existing data warehouse apps
  • Enterprise Service Bus apps, where the main purpose is to connect apps with other apps, without adding business value or logic
  • Apps with heavy mathematical calculations, although Mendix would be a good layer on top of an AI solution or calculation engine that compute statistical models or data analytics
  • Web portals with more than 10,000 concurrent users
  • Mobile apps with more than 100,000 concurrent users
  • Apps where the main goal is to visualize data

Defining App Value

By thoroughly defining the app’s purpose and value, you provide a clear roadmap for development. You thus align the project with organizational goals, and set the stage for successful implementation and adoption. These are some things to keep in mind:

• Business value proposition — Clearly articulate the app’s value proposition in terms of the problem it is trying to solve, and the benefits it is trying to bring to the business.

• User experience and satisfaction:

  • Identify the target audience or users who will benefit from the app. Understanding end-users helps in tailoring the app to their needs.
  • Consider the user experience as a critical aspect of the app’s value. An intuitive and user-friendly interface enhances user satisfaction and adoption.
  • Value is often derived not just from functionalities, but also from how easily and effectively users can accomplish their tasks.

• Efficiency and productivity:

  • Assess how the app improves operational efficiency and productivity. Identify areas where manual processes can be automated, reducing errors and saving time.
  • Highlight any potential cost savings or resource optimization achieved through the app.

• Innovation and competitive advantage:

  • If applicable, emphasize how the app introduces innovative solutions or features that set your organization apart from competitors.
  • Consider how the app positions the organization for future growth and adaptation to changing market conditions.

• Adaptability and scalability — Highlight the app’s adaptability to changing business needs, and its scalability to accommodate future growth.

• Measurable objectives:

  • Establish measurable objectives to gauge the success of the app. Define key performance indicators (KPIs) that will help evaluate its impact on business processes, efficiency, or other relevant metrics.
  • Measurable objectives provide a basis for assessing the app’s effectiveness and return on investment.

• Alignment with organizational goals:

  • Confirm that the app’s purpose aligns with the overall goals and vision of the organization. It should contribute positively to the strategic direction of the company.
  • Understand how the app fits into the larger ecosystem of organizational processes and systems.
    You can try filling in the template available at the beginning of this section.

Setting Up the Deployment Architecture and Resources

Mendix apps can be deployed in different ways, mainly:

• Public
• Private
• On-premises

Mendix can also be deployed to any cloud platform which supports a version of Kubernetes or Cloud Foundry. With Mendix for Private Cloud, you can choose the cloud provider of your preference, e.g. your own Azure or AWS infrastructures. If there already is access to an on-premise hosting environment, Mendix can also be deployed on-premise.

When setting up your deployment strategy, it is important to look at the features that are needed, as some features that rely on the target platform can work differently.

If your organization is deploying on Private Cloud or on-prem, please make sure that you are ready to take on the effort and responsibility of managing all hosting and support of the application deployments.

For a list of all the deployment options that are available, see Deploying Apps.

Mendix Cloud

Mendix Cloud is the default deployment option. It is a fully integrated solution, with easy setting up and administration.
This is a great option for your first app if you do not have any specific private cloud constraints. Within Mendix Cloud, there are options for multi-tenant and single-tenant cloud environments. Deploying to Mendix Cloud gives you the shortest time-to-value.

• Pros: Fast and easy, all hosting is taken care of. It has the best utilization rate for your infrastructure, allowing you to maintain optimal flexibility and to convert your capital investment into operational expenses. This option is supported by Mendix, and it is the most optimized cloud to run Mendix apps.
• Cons: Some organizations don’t allow shared cloud usage, and require air-gapped or private-cloud options.

Mendix for Private Cloud

With Mendix for Private Cloud, you can choose the cloud provider of your preference, such as your own Azure or AWS infrastructures.

• Pros: Your DevOps team has complete control over app deployment and app lifecycle, with centralized management. It is cloud-agnostic, and you can choose on-premises or your chosen cloud provider.
• Cons: Requires your own experienced staff to set up and maintain with reduced Mendix Support due to lack of access and visibility.

For Private deployment, you need to be ready to start that process immediately in order to avoid development and go-live date delays.

This is the Private Cloud responsibility matrix:

Options for Development Resources

With Mendix, you have multiple options to choose from for the development of your apps:

• In-house development — Train and/or hire Mendix developers to develop and support all your Mendix apps.
  When training in-house, we recommend choosing individuals who either have a traditional development background or have some understanding of object-oriented programming (OOP)). Beyond the technical side, Mendix recommends looking for individuals who can provide consulting to your business team.
• Mendix partner — Work with one of our certified Mendix partners to support your app development. Our directory of partners is listed here, but your Mendix team is a great resource to identify a good fit for you.
  This can be a great option to get your project kick-started, or if you have no future goals of building out your internal development team.
• Mendix Expert Services — Choosing Mendix Expert Services is the right option if you plan on building out your internal team and need enablement and support alongside app development. Expert Services can help prove the value of the Mendix internally while simultaneously coaching your team on how to continue with the apps.
• Hybrid — You can simultaneously grow your in-house team and supplement with a Mendix partner and/or our Expert Services team.

Regardless of which option you choose, we always recommend that at least one person internally has been trained on Mendix and is technically capable of directing the project. Outsourcing every technical role creates a siloed development team that does not truly understand your business needs.