Lead Mendix Implementation in Your Organization

Introduction

With this guide, you can unlock the full potential of the Mendix platform and accelerate your application development journey in your organization.

This guide covers everything you need to know to get started with Mendix in your company. This guide is meant for anyone who is in charge of managing the entire Mendix program in an organization. It will take you through defining your low code vision, defining company-wide settings as well as kicking off what will become the first app you will launch. Follow these steps to unlock the full potential of the Mendix platform and accelerate your journey into the digital execution practice.

Welcome! What You Will Learn in This Guide

Welcome to Mendix, the leading low-code application development platform that empowers you to turn your ideas into outcomes quickly and efficiently!

The “Lead Mendix Implementation in Your Organization" guide is designed to help you navigate through the initial steps of getting started with Mendix in your company.

By the end of this guide, you’ll be able to:

• Describe the various elements of the Mendix platform

• Explain the 5 P’s of the Digital Execution Practice and how they are imperative to low-code success

• Create a getting-started plan

• Kick-off your Mendix program

• Establish governance guidelines

• Prepare your first project and onboard your first project team

• Launch your first application

Who This Guide Is For, How to Use It, and for How Long

This guide is tailored for organizations new to Mendix, especially for leaders responsible for implementing Mendix in their company. It is designed to help you navigate your Mendix journey from starting up until your first application is launched. It also reflects the most common steps in that journey and is a collection of resources you can use to ensure success on each of these steps.

We will not talk about technical setup here, but will guide you through managing the organizational change along with all the initial decisions you will need to make to ensure success. Think of this guide as your guide to getting started with Mendix at your company and if you are (a part of the team) in charge of making that a success, then this is the perfect starting point for you.

The content in this guide can be covered in a few hours, but it was designed as more of a guide versus a course, so you will likely come back to it as you are working towards getting that first app live. Our most successful customers tend to do that within 4-5 months, but the time frame heavily depends on your organization, the choice of that first app, and many other factors that will also influence how long you might find the content in this guide useful.

Questions and Feedback

Got a question on anything related to the Digital Execution Practice and the process of getting started on the organization side of things?

• Reach out to your Mendix team:

  They are always willing to answer questions, help you make decisions, and provide extra information. But even if you don’t have a dedicated CSM, we have provided extra resources throughout this guide that should help you out.

• Ask the Community in our Digital Execution Practice space:

  This is a part of the Mendix Community that is specifically dedicated to helping others succeed with their digital execution practice. Feel free to ask questions there, and our own Mendix experts, as well as other companies using Mendix who have been down the same road you are starting now, will share their experience. If you haven’t already joined, you can do that with one click here.

Having trouble with something (more) technical?

• Check out Mendix Documentation:

  Sometimes the right information is just a click away in a document.

• Contact the Mendix Community:

  The Mendix Community is where you can find help when you get stuck. You can also help others when you know the answer! Be sure to first check whether someone has already asked the question you’re wondering about. If not, feel free to post it and our community will help you out! If you didn’t already know, you can gain points when you do so!

• Submit a Support ticket:

  If something really appears to be broken from a technical point of view (for example, you can’t even visit or edit your app anymore), contact our Support Team, and they will do their absolute best to help you out.

Have some feedback?

• Give your feedback using our Feedback widget at the bottom of the page. If you have suggestions for improvement, please tell us.

Get Familiar With the 5 P’s of the Digital Execution Practice

In this section you will learn about the 5 P’s of Digital Transformation and their importance to your Mendix success. You will also get an overview of the Mendix platform and learn where you can find all the extra information you may need.

Learning Objectives

Let’s start with building the foundation of your Mendix knowledge!

By the end of this section, you will:

• Assign your Mendix Admin
• List the different components of the Mendix platform and explain their role
• Identify the three major stages of the Digital Execution Practice and what each stage entails
• Describe the 5 P’s of the Digital Execution Practice and their importance to your long-term success
• Create your Portfolio in Mendix Portfolio Management to manage your initiatives
• Recognize the different roles and skills required to build your first Mendix team
• Choose the right people for your Mendix team
• Explain how to build repeatable practices and long-term outcomes
• Describe the benefits that the Mendix Platform brings to an organization
• Identify best practices to promote the value of low-code within your organization
• List the available options you have for staying up to date with Mendix

Assign Your Mendix Admin

First let’s get one admin (no pun intended) thing out of the way. Your company needs at least one Admin. It might make sense for the first admin to be you and then you can easily assign as many other admins as you need.

So why do you need an admin? Your developers are able to create new apps, invite other users to their app teams, deploy apps, and invite app end-users to give feedback, among many other activities. Insights into these company activities are provided in Control Center in one central overview. You can read more about Control Center here or follow this learning path.

Do you already have at least one admin? If that’s the case, you can see them on the list when you open Control Center, and you can skip the rest of this section.

A Mendix Admin will normally be someone in the IT department of your company, and they will have full access to Control Center, which will give them visibility and essential controls to make sure the apps deliver business value at acceptable cost and risk. You can assign your first Mendix Admin through Mendix Support, just choose “Standard Change: Assign Mendix Admin” from the dropdown. This first admin can then add other admins.

Get Familiar With Mendix

Let’s start with building the foundation of your Mendix knowledge and get you familiar with the Mendix platform!

Mendix is the platform that helps you turn ideas into outcomes. It contains all the tools you need to plan your application portfolio, ensure the right ideas get invested in, manage the entire application development lifecycle, and get end-user feedback on what to build. The Mendix platform also provides a space for anyone working with Mendix to interact with the community, share ideas and components as well as find help in case they get stuck.

Here are some resources to help familiarize yourself with the Mendix platform:

• The “Mendix Ecosystem” lecture in our Rapid Developer course offers a short description of each of the elements of the platform relevant for developers together with useful links.
• Apps will help you explore apps: the central location to collaborate, deploy, and manage your Mendix apps.

Also, don’t forget to bookmark your “Favorites”!

• Mendix Support: Tickets, issues, incidents
• Mendix Academy: Certifications and trainings
• Mendix Community: Online community
• Mendix Blog: Articles and trending topics
• Mendix Docs: Platform documentation
• Mendix Partner Hub: Explore our Partner Network
• Siemens Annual Reports: Financial, corporate governance, sustainability
• Mendix Marketplace: Modules and other content provided by Mendix, partners or the community

Introduction to Digital Execution Practice (DEP): the 3 S’s and the 5 P’s

The 3 S’s of Digital Execution Practice: Start, Structure and Scale

Your journey to innovation will go through three major stages: Start, Structure and Scale. You are now in the Start stage, where the goal is to lay the foundations for your innovation factory. In Start, you want to develop applications that realize value quickly. The reason for this is two-fold:

1. You’ll be spending a lot of time building a team and putting the necessary prerequisites in place in terms of infrastructure and process. Because of that…
2. You want quick wins. Quick wins are important because you’ll use these to prove the value of your new approach. Celebrating your first success will help you gain broader support around the company.

If the Start stage is about establishing and proving the benefits of rapid application development, then Structure is about building out predictability and continuity. Structure is about growing from your first set of apps to a portfolio with a diverse array of apps addressing multiple use cases, expanding your first team into multiple teams, and expanding your developer center.

Structure is about taking the process of your first agile experience that you established in Start to a process that institutes shorter release cycles under strict governance. Structure is where you begin to formalize your rapid application development process — establishing an architecture, enabling continuous delivery, and creating governance. By establishing predictability and stability, you’re building the scaffolding for future successes.

In Scale, you have learned how to use Mendix to speed up and scale out app development and start delivering real value for your business. Your talent has been trained and activated in such a way that you can shift them around the organization to work on projects where their skills are best put to use. You are applying greater automation to your processes to efficiently and rapidly deliver and manage hundreds of applications with strategic impact. This includes automating deployment and maintenance to support a large portfolio, automating quality assurance to proactively monitor the maintainability of your projects, and enabling greater reusability by establishing a private app store. With these capabilities in place, you maximize value and productivity by creating distributed innovation capabilities throughout the enterprise. You have achieved continuous productivity and efficiency.

The 5 P’s of Digital Transformation

Sounds great, right? But how do you get there? Step by step. There are five major areas you will need to focus on. We call these the 5 P’s of Digital Transformation and aligning the P’s (Portfolio, People, Process, Platform, and Promotion) to your organization’s digital strategy is crucial to your Mendix success. Let’s go over them one by one.

Portfolio: Choosing a Use Case That Is Equally Meaningful and Doable

Getting your digital transformation program off the ground starts with identifying the right projects and creating an application portfolio of quick wins in high-value initiatives.

Why quick wins?

Proving the value of a program—whether it’s through software that allows your business to create a new channel of revenue or an application that saves employees time on an internal process—allows you to realize immediate success and justify a broader organizational change. A diversity of use cases is important here, to show that your application portfolio can reach many different departments and address a variety of needs.

And guess what? We have a tool to help you with that. Mendix Portfolio Management gives you a way to identify, track, and plan out your initiatives. So, let’s get started by creating your Portfolio board here. All you need to do is click on Get Started and then Create your first Portfolio.

If you would like to learn more about how to manage your portfolio of ideas and applications. You might also have done a portfolio workshop with Mendix experts before, in which case, you may already have an Excel file with your list of initiatives that you can easily import into your brand new board. If not, we discuss your first app selection in more detail in 3.

People: Building a Strong Mendix Team

The people you choose for your teams are absolutely crucial to the success of your digital execution program. You want to find the right people with the right skills who are excited about and can commit time and energy to the program, no matter their job title.

A strong first Mendix team is more than just the number of people in the room. Your first Mendix team should include a core development team comprised of a combination of a professional developer — someone with technical expertise — and a business developer — someone familiar with the platform that can act as a power user if needed. The key is to have developers who can collaborate closely with end users, bridging the gap between business needs and technical possibilities. In the beginning, it’s highly likely that not all these people will come from your own organization (we will further review the options in section Review Options for Development Resources), but this is an overview of all the higher level roles you will need sooner or later.The following leadership roles are essential to the success of any new platform or paradigm:

• Executive Sponsors: Success starts at the top, where senior executive buy-in is a must. These are the top-level executives, ideally representing both the Business/Operations and IT, who are willing to be engaged periodically to provide oversight and steering-committee level guidance. These people won’t necessarily be involved day-to-day, but they understand the big picture vision of how Mendix will help the enterprise achieve its digital transformation and low-code goals, how it fits to ‘play nicely’ with other technology stacks and tools like Microsoft’s ADO or Power Apps, and what the transformational value is expected. Your Mendix team can work with these individuals to help understand, define, and refine their role, the value proposition for high ROI, etc.

• Program Owner: You need a person to lead the program and mandate/enable change; who generates excitement about the importance of this transformation and can inspire people to want to participate. This person is directly responsible for the overall success of the platform’s implementation, bringing impactful apps to fruition, ensuring value targets are defined and tracked, and that the teams are properly assigned and allocated for success.

  It’s common for Program Owners to work very closely with their Mendix CSMs to define and implement success plans and to evolve those plans over time to ensure ever-increasing returns and solid value. For smaller organizations, this person may also be part of the Core Team; for larger organizations, it’s common for this person to be a part of the Center of Excellence leadership team or to be a dedicated senior resource overseeing global success. Areas of responsibility include assurance of proper architectural and governance guidelines/adherence, successful regional and global rollouts, successful team growth/training/enablement plans, KPI definition and tracking, etc.

• Center of Excellence Lead (COE Lead): Generally, larger organizations implement a Mendix COE to help define and enforce good governance, development, and enablement practices that can evolve with the business and technological changes for overall platform and program success throughout the enterprise over time. The COE Lead ensures the Mendix COE is properly staffed to support, oversee and enable development teams, and ensures the products produced are of high-quality following best practices for high re-usability, maintainability and return on investment. This person generally has sufficient senior-level technical and managerial skills to oversee the COE’s Enterprise and Solution Architects, DevOps technical leads, trainers and mentors, and other experienced staff.

Product owners are key players to a successful program, because they’ll have in-depth knowledge of the business, the product, and its users, and will have insight into the value that it will create. If possible, make sure that your first product owner comes from your own organization and is familiar with the problem you are setting out to solve with your first application. Product owner is not really a leadership role, but the choice of a product owner is crucial for the success of your first app, which is why we touch on it here. POs are also a part of the agile scrum team, so we will mention them again in section Identify Your First Mendix Project Team.

Architects will help establish a target architecture, infrastructure, and governance.

Finally, an application development manager needs to spearhead the initiative and drive the program and the cross-functional teams who will deliver on those projects.

The blueprint to build your first Mendix team

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.

Find problem solvers

Find team members who care about solving business problems rather than people who prefer to build solutions based on detailed requirements. There will be many obstacles to overcome due to existing processes and the culture of the business, so seek out people who have a “can-do” attitude who can be change evangelists.

Traditional developers (with experience in programming languages such as C#, Python, Java, etc.) are usually very quick to grasp Mendix as well. Here you might want to look for people who are more outcome-oriented and love adding new tools to their toolbox.

That said, don’t get too hung up on job roles — you also need people who want to test their limit and have some technical proficiency, but also understand business challenges. A host of individuals that we’ve seen successfully make the transition come from business analysis, UX, front-end web design, and business intelligence backgrounds.

In the end, selecting the right team and arming them for success is the cornerstone of success, not just for your first project but for your entire rapid application development program.

A who’s who

It’s important to keep your team small as you build your Mendix Center of Excellence (your central repository of development expertise, reusable components, and governance guidance that business teams can access as they build their specialized solutions). With a small team, you can deliver new applications quickly, avoiding much of the miscommunication and delays that often come with larger development teams. Smaller teams encourage productivity and creativity. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ “two pizza rule” states that you should never have a meeting where two pizzas couldn’t feed the entire group. The smaller the team, the more room for brainstorming and peer review.

Mendix developers come with all types of skill-sets

Developers come from all parts of the business, not just IT. From your high-code programmers, to your business-centric developers, to your tech-savvy business analysts, low-code platforms let you build teams of makers from all backgrounds.

As the main action point here, start thinking about who you need to kick off building your first Mendix application and start talking to them about it. Some names are probably coming to mind already and you will get much more information on who you need exactly in section Identify Your First Mendix Project Team.

Process: Building Repeatable Practices for Long-Term Outcomes

Successful digital execution means changing the way you work and establishing rapid application development processes. Agile methodologies like Scrum are a good starting point, splitting the work into sprints and basing them off user stories, but you also need to change from a traditional way of development and operations into a BizDevOps approach, which promotes close collaboration and shared knowledge between the business team, developers, and operational team. It ditches the division between those departments to get rid of unnecessary knowledge silos that only disrupt the information flow.

Minimum Viable Product

One important concept to embrace for your process (if you haven’t already) is the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). MVP is a version of an application with just enough features to be usable by early customers who can then provide feedback for future development.

Minimum viable products are meant to be incomplete by nature, with the goal of delivering value quickly, then figuring out next requirements and iterating on them based on the input from actual users. This ensures that the application will provide the right user experience and achieve the goals you set. It is easier said than done, though, and the change in the way of working takes a bit of time to get used to. If you haven’t involved your end users into the process before, it may feel like an extra task that is slowing you down but trust the process — getting their input early on will save you many costly changes down the road. And just because something is not a part of the MVP, does not mean it won’t be delivered just a couple of days or weeks later, since this way of working enables lighting fast iterations!

Put a governance structure in place

A core element to success is repeating it. Repeated success leads to and informs your governance around rapid application 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 around build, deployment, and architecture as well as security/compliance. You’re assigning the people on your team responsibilities around these best practices.

Platform: Tying All These Pieces Together With a Pure Low-Code Platform

As you hurtle towards digital execution, the Rapid Application Development platform you choose shouldn’t just be about new technology trends, like Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, or Blockchain, or whatever comes down the line. You need a platform that also helps you improve operational efficiency, reduce time-to-market, and foster collaboration between Business and IT. Something that addresses the present and prepares you for the future. Seek out a platform that helps you not only deliver faster, but more accurately, so that you can produce robust applications in a matter of weeks.

Mendix is a platform specifically built to tie all these pieces together and enable enterprises to get things done quickly as well as allow your teams and technology ecosystem to evolve and embrace the different technologies that will come along.

High-level positioning

High-level positioning is about knowing how and where Mendix fits in with the rest of your IT ecosystem. Use the Start stage to experience the benefits of instant provisioning, not just of the application environment, but all the software needed to support the entire lifecycle, from project management to repositories. Learning more about how easy it should be to deploy and operate apps shows how developers can do this themselves and helps your innovation factory achieve continuous productivity and efficiency.

Deployment strategy

The Start stage is an excellent time to start exploring your cloud options, and use this knowledge as input for strategic choices in the future. You’re most likely going to deploy your application on Mendix Cloud because it’s the most optimized cloud to run Mendix-built applications. Built on top of Cloud Foundry and AWS, Mendix Cloud is the deployment 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.

But as you expand your portfolio and move from Start to Structure, you will need to consider other deployment options and moving to a multi-cloud environment. Understanding the cloud environments to which you’ll deploy—for example, the security features and how they fit into your existing security framework—will help inform how you move to Structure.

Data and integration strategy

Similar to your deployment strategy, you also want to begin considering what your data and integration strategy looks like with Mendix as a part of your overall technology ecosystem. You need to consider your architecture strategy, too. This is an opportunity for that vanguard architect you elected to come in and understand what architecture works best for your development program.

Promotion: Showcasing Your Successes and How They Connect to Your Strategy

We’ve all heard the saying, “If a tree falls in the forest but no one is around to hear it, does it make any sound?” Similarly, if you are excellent at the core components of digital transformation but don’t communicate it to anyone, does it really have an impact? That is where promotion comes into play. Without promotion, success can go unnoticed, and the value of your efforts may not be recognized. Promotion tends to be a challenge for many IT organizations, in part because IT teams do not often have professional marketers. Even without a marketing team behind you, here are five ways you can better promote the value of low-code within your organization.

Shaping and communicating your low-code vision: We’ll help you solidify your low-code vision later in this guide, but once you have it, don’t let it live on a shelf or in the cloud — allow it to evolve with input from your organization. Communicate your vision in cross-functional meetings and ask for support in getting organizational leadership to embed the vision into their message as well.

Stakeholder management: Involve stakeholders early and often to build enthusiasm for digital transformation success. Start by bringing cross-functional partners on board who you already have strong relationships with, and work together to identify the problems you want to solve. By building a plan together you can help ensure your initiatives will get support.

Internal PR: Build a plan for how you will raise awareness and involvement in your low-code implementation and ensure your executive sponsor helps your PR efforts. You can leverage existing communication channels such as company meetings, newsletters, or shared collaboration sites to spread your message. Start by sharing your plan and vision, and then use these channels to celebrate success after your first go-live.

Community building: Digital transformation is all about bringing together business and IT. Start with a portfolio workshop to brainstorm ideas for your first application, and then identify teams who will collaborate through implementation and launch. Identify a core group of champions who can raise awareness on your behalf even when you aren’t in the room.

Celebrating success: We love a good reason to celebrate, and hope you’ll use milestones large and small to celebrate your successes. Acknowledging your achievements, whether it’s getting the team to complete Academy certifications, building the first reusable component, finishing the first development sprint or launching your first application, celebrations are a powerful way to boost team morale and drive future momentum.

Additional Resources

Below you can find a collection of different resources to grow your knowledge regarding the 5 P’s of Digital Transformation and their importance in your Mendix journey.

• In our DEP Manual you can learn more about the 5 P’s and how to best leverage Mendix’s low-code platform.
• Follow the Digital Execution Learning Path to learn the steps of successful digital execution and the meaning of rapid application development maturity.
• In the Agile Awareness Learning Path, you can read more about the Digital Execution Stages as well as the core tenets of digital execution.
• You can check our Mendix blog where you will find many interesting articles for Digital Transformation, like this one that explains the importance of digital transformation and the 5P’s; or this one about the digital transformation journey.

Stay up to Date With Mendix

It’s important to know what’s happening with the Mendix Platform to be sure that you’re getting the most out of every capability.

• DEP Space on Forum

  The DEP Space on the Forum provides a unique opportunity to interact with other Mendix leaders. Ask questions from experienced Mendix team members or other customers about anything related to digital transformation.

• Subscribe to platform news

  Subscribe to Platform Updates to keep up with all the changes happening with the Mendix platform and how it could affect your apps.

• Mx Community

  Join the Mendix Community to connect with over 290,000 community members. The Mendix Community is a great place for developers to ask questions and post ideas for our product managers.

• Mx Blog

  Subscribe to our blog and deep dive into our diverse library of articles and blog posts, where we discuss everything from Mendix best practices to industry trends.

We’ve got more steps to success coming your way.

Summary

In this section, you learned more about the Mendix platform and explored the 3 S’s and the 5 P’s of digital transformation and how these can contribute to a successful journey. More specifically you:

• Created your Mendix Portfolio Management board that will help you identify, track, and plan out your initiatives.
• Started thinking about the people you want to include to establish a strong Mendix team.
• Familiarized with the processes you’ll have to build to ensure long-term outcomes.
• Outlined the benefits the Mendix Platform brings to your organization.
• Identified best practices to promote the value of low-code within your organization.
• Assigned your Mendix admin.

and

• You are now a member of our Mendix community, where you can always seek additional resources or inspiration!

Great job! You are now ready to move to the next phase: Create a getting-started plan. You can find out more about that and helpful resources in the following section.

Create a Getting Started Plan

In this section, you will learn why and how to create an effective getting started plan.

Learning Objectives

Now that you are familiar with the Mendix platform and the 5 P’s of digital transformation, it is crucial to continue by creating a getting-started plan for your Mendix journey!

By the end of this section, 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 application
• Define the value and purpose of your first application
• Identify the most suitable deployment option for your Mendix app
• List the different development options and choose the right one for your organization

Create (Or Revise) Your Low-Code Vision

We encourage you to take the time to develop a clear vision for low-code development in your organization. It 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. Low-code shouldn’t (and frankly, doesn’t) operate in its own universe, so the vision should 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. And your vision should reflect your company’s culture. We have compiled a set of guidelines and recommendations to help you in defining your vision. Some are widely recognized as best practices, and others are based on our extensive experience. Your Mendix Transformation Manager, Digital Business Advisor, or Customer Success Manager will be able to support you in this endeavor. And if you have defined your low code vision already, now is the perfect time to revisit it and make sure you are happy with it.

Preparation

This step requires some analysis and time investment. Reference company documents and talk to your team and other key stakeholders on the business and technology side.

It is key to ensuring 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 for the preparation task (you can find this in the resources, at the top of this page).

First iteration: Mind map / brainstorm

Start exploring the areas that you want to transform. We recommend thinking along the lines of the 5 P’s—People, Process, Platform, Portfolio, Promotion—because these cover all the aspects you need when undergoing a transformation. This also ties well into other tools we use such as the Maturity Assessment, which is also grouped according to the 5 P’s.

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. More than that and it’s too far in the future, too fuzzy, you can’t know what the world will look like in 10 years. Too short and there’s not enough time to do something impactful—it won’t be inspirational. Add key words to a mind map for each of the five areas.

Second iteration: Prioritize and add 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: Evaluate and refine

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 “Is this ambitious enough or is it too ambitious?”

The objectives need to be achievable, but it also shouldn’t be too easy. You need to find that balance. But don’t overthink it—you will probably need to adjust some key results along the way, and that’s OK.

More about that in the “Use your vision to steer your journey” objective.

Socialize your vision and gather feedback

Show your draft vision to key stakeholders and a selection of employees to get their feedback. When others read your vision, they need to experience a moment of awe and wonder. If their jaws don’t drop a little bit, you need to think bigger. Small, safe, calculated plans don’t inspire—a vision needs a wow factor. And don’t be put off if there’s a small number—around 10%-15% or so—who don’t like it.

What you don’t want is indifference.

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.

Write your final version

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

If you think it would be more efficient, you might want to get support from a writer to polish some of those sentences so they pop off the page and resonate with your team and stakeholders. However, balance the effort you invest—done is better than perfect!

Communicate your vision effectively

Once you have your vision, you need to communicate it effectively to your team. You need to make sure that everyone understands it so that they are motivated to work towards it.

People should understand the significance of what they are doing. They should feel connected to something larger than themselves. That gives their work meaning and shows their value in the organization. That sense of meaning and purpose is one of the most fulfilling outcomes of a vision.

You may choose to have town halls or an all-hands to present it in person. Others have made videos that can be shown asynchronously, and that people can come back to for reference and for onboarding. Only relying on the written word such as email is usually not dynamic or inspiring enough for this type of communication. Be brave to try something new, but choose a tone and method that feels authentic, too.

Build Your Getting Started Plan

As the primary person responsible for the implementation of Mendix within your organization, it’s critical to have a plan for getting started. So far, we’ve introduced the 5 P’s, and now it’s time to think about how each of these relates to your own organization’s success. Having a plan for getting started helps to build alignment and buy-in among your business and IT stakeholders. Your low-code vision, as discussed in the previous section, is critically important to this 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-amount of ROI with our first application”. 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 those 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. Is your team new to working in Agile? Adopting a new way of working might be one of your challenges, and the getting started plan will need to focus on how to bring your team up to speed. Think through any factors that might hinder your progress and work with stakeholders on how you’ll tackle them together.

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 first application
  • Gather relevant stakeholders to show progress
  • Share the success at company meeting or in newsletters

The final step of your getting started plan involves capturing your 5 P milestones and building a timeline. Below are some examples that we use frequently with Mendix customers that you can take and make your own: Add details, and overlay dates appropriate for your organization, etc. Work independently or work with your customer success manager to think through what this might look like for you.

Start Your Mendix Portfolio

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

To make sure that the strategy is reflected in the initiatives, you need to put into place a program to ensure vision alignment at every level, across every department. At this level, program owners or managers empower collaboration across departments. This will ensure that every solution will always meet the criteria and support the goals of the vision. It’s about trying to create software that delivers immediate value, which requires input from and collaboration with many people across your organization.

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

To start, think about the big picture: What is your organization striving to achieve? Jot down a few ideas that can help you get there. These could include solutions to migrate from legacy apps, improve customer experience or increase efficiency. And Mendix has a tool to help you do just that!

You should have already created your portfolio in section Summary, if you haven’t yet let’s start by creating your Portfolio board, you can do that by going here, clicking Open Portfolio Management and then click Create Portfolio. You can make it restricted for the time being (that means you will have to approve other people before they gain access to it).

If you have done a portfolio workshop already and maybe have your list of initiatives in an Excel file, you can easily import them. If not, just create a few cards that represent your ideas. Your Mendix team can also help you with this, so please do not hesitate to reach out to them to go over everything together.

Portfolio management is a key activity that ensures you are always creating solutions that bring the most value to your organization (and since we’re talking Mendix here, this is where you also decide if Mendix is the right tool for each one of the ideas). This means that you (maybe together with your stakeholders) need to go over your main portfolio, keep initiatives up to date and adjust or reprioritize if needed. You can learn a lot more about this process in the dedicated learning path. For now, the most important thing is to list the initiatives that are top of mind for you and use that input to choose the ideal first app.

So, let’s add your initiatives. Click the Create Initiative button on the top right and start jotting down your ideas.

Finalize First Application Selection

It’s important that your first applications bring immediate value upon launch, because rapid application development isn’t just about delivering rapidly, it’s about realizing value quicker than you have before.

We recommend that you start with adding at least three applications ideas to your portfolio. While the first success is always important, to truly grasp the new rapid application development process and the Mendix platform, developing multiple apps and demonstrating repeated success is a best practice.

As for your very first project, you want to pick a use case out of your portfolio that is equal parts meaningful and doable. A great first project is something that impacts the enterprise positively but can be completed by a relatively small team in a reasonable timeframe.

Here’s a quick checklist of things to consider when choosing your first application:

Go live quickly: One of the main goals of your first application is to validate your ability to rapidly bring new ideas to market. It’s important that you identify quick wins, so select applications that are limited in scope and can work independently in production.

Make them worthy: The first application should also be highly visible within the organization. It must have the right urgency and executive support, and also deliver tangible business value. Select an app idea where you’re sure the results will get noticed and the success will be shared by your stakeholders.

Involve business stakeholders: Requirements are often unclear and need to be refined through collaboration with, and feedback from, business stakeholders. The goal is to illustrate the higher level of creativity and collaboration facilitated by this new rapid application development approach. The key to involving business stakeholders lies with the role of the product owner. The product owner knows what needs to be built. Application success is achieved when the development team and product owner work together with a passion for making applications that deliver value.

Limit dependencies: External factors over which you have little, or no control can quickly diminish the productivity advantage offered by the Mendix platform. That’s like using a permanent marker on a brand-new whiteboard.

Don’t get bogged down in requirements: Digital innovation projects are often marked by unclear business requirements. Don’t worry; this is a good thing, because it is better to define a high-level goal or purpose versus having detailed requirements. The more requirements your first applications have upfront, the longer it’s going to take to release. Make sure that you have at least two follow-up iterations planned so that you can capture and refine requirements and build trust with the business stakeholders. This shows them that even if their requirements don’t make it into the initial MVP, they will come in the next versions.

Make failures into wins: It’s okay to admit defeat. In this case, it’s actually beneficial. It may sound contradictory, but good first applications are often ones that your organization previously failed to deliver.

For instance, a Mendix customer initially failed to build an application that calculates prices because the algorithm was so specific to the business, and the .NET developer couldn’t grasp all the nuances. Using Mendix, business stakeholders and IT developers were able to take that failure and turn it into a win, collaborate much more closely, and successfully deliver a first version of the application in a few days.

Make them smart: To ensure that apps deliver the best possible experience to the user, they should be intelligent, contextual and proactive — i.e., smart. Develop an app that uses AI to personalize a user’s experience or uses geolocation to tell let you know the location for the cake you ordered for your big app launch party.

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 an application has. Complexity can be defined as how technically complex the application is; i.e., how many integrations does the application require? You want to start on the left-hand side of the quadrant, which represents your team learning and feeling comfortable with the new way of working.

Which type of projects is Mendix a good fit for?

Another thing that might help is understanding which type of projects Mendix is the best fit for (and which ones are not a great fit). Here’s a little guide for that.

Mendix fits a wide variety of software applications, but some really stand out as a perfect fit:

• Any software requirement where there is no off-the-shelf solution available

• Software projects when the requirements are not very clear yet and the business also requires flexibility during the development process

• Software projects where there is going to be a high degree of business involvement during the development process

• Situations where the customer wants to build multiple applications and they want to benefit from reusing components

• Applications that require multichannel (desktop/mobile/tablet etc.)

• Workflow applications

• Customer-facing applications that need to be pixel perfect

• Flexible applications: applications that start small but need to be able to scale up

• Applications that require governance, since things like audit and traceability are built in the platform

• Projects where resources are scarce, since Mendix is easy to learn developers can be trained internally and citizen developers can be used

• Applications that the customer wants to maintain and support themselves

• Projects where changes after go-live are likely to happen

• Internal work portals

• Process-oriented applications

• Integrations applications

• Applications that require data-management

• Applications that replace Excel applications

• Applications that have integrations with other platforms and systems (like SAP)

• Projects that are going to replace a legacy application

• Any new solutions where the data is also going to be stored in the application

• Extensions of System of Record (ERP/PLM/MES etc.)

Which type of projects would Mendix potentially not be the perfect fit for?

Even though you can build almost anything with Mendix, especially with the extensibility of the platform using Java, Mendix might not be the perfect fit for every application. Below are some examples of applications where additional work needs to be done.

• Games (as Mendix is aimed to build business applications)

• Content Management Systems, but Mendix can integrate well with existing CMS for creating CMS portals and such

• Data warehouse applications, similar to CMS, Mendix can integrate well with existing data warehouse applications

• Enterprise Service Bus applications. When the main purpose is to connect applications with other applications, without adding business value/logic, Mendix might not be the best fit

• Applications with heavy mathematical calculations, but 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 applications with more than 100,000 concurrent users

• Applications where the main goal is to visualize data

Define Application Value

By thoroughly defining the application’s purpose and value, you provide a clear roadmap for development, aligning the project with organizational goals, and setting the stage for successful implementation and adoption. What will help you do that is trying to think along these lines:

1. Business value proposition:

   • Clearly articulate the value proposition of the application. Ask yourself: What problem does this application solve? What specific business process or pain point does it address? How does it contribute to the organization’s success? What benefits will it bring to the business, such as cost savings, revenue generation, or improved customer satisfaction?

2. User experience and satisfaction:

   • Identify the target audience or users who will benefit from the application. Understanding the end-users helps in tailoring the application to their needs.

   • Consider the user experience as a critical aspect of the application’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.

3. Efficiency and productivity:

   • Assess how the application 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 application.

4. Innovation and competitive advantage:

   • If applicable, emphasize how the application introduces innovative solutions or features that set your organization apart from competitors.

   • Consider how the application positions the organization for future growth and adaptation to changing market conditions.

5. Adaptability and scalability:

   • Highlight the application’s adaptability to changing business needs and its scalability to accommodate future growth. A valuable application is one that can evolve with the organization.

6. Measurable objectives:

   • Establish measurable objectives to gauge the success of the application. 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 application’s effectiveness and return on investment.

7. Alignment with organizational goals:

   • Confirm that the application 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 application fits into the larger ecosystem of organizational processes and systems.

You can also try filling in a template such as this one (you can find this template attached in the Resources box at the top of this page):

Set up Deployment Architecture and Resources

Mendix applications can be deployed in different ways, mainly:

1. Public

2. Private

3. On-premise

Mendix Cloud is the default deployment option and has the advantage of being a fully integrated solution, with easy setting up and administrating. When developing your first application and if there are no specific (private) cloud constraints, it makes sense to choose the user friendly Mendix Cloud option. Within Mendix Cloud, there are options for multi-tenant cloud environments and single-tenant cloud environments. Deploying to Mendix Cloud gives you the shortest time-to-value.

Mendix can also be deployed to any cloud platform which supports a version of 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.

Some highlights to consider:

Mendix Cloud:

• 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 convert your capital investment into operational expenses. This option is supported by Mendix and it is the most optimized cloud to run Mendix applications.
• Cons: Some organizations don’t allow shared cloud usage and require air-gapped or private-cloud options

Mendix Private Cloud:

• Pros: Your DevOps team has complete control over application deployment and application lifecycle, with centralized management. It is cloud agnostic, and you can choose on-premise 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, please be ready to start that process immediately in order to avoid development and go-live date delays.

See below for Private Cloud responsibility matrix:

Review Options for Development Resources (Who Will Build Your First App?)

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

1. In-house development

   a. Train and/or hire Mendix developers to develop and support all your Mendix applications.

   When training in-house, we recommend choosing individuals who either have a traditional development background or have some understanding of OOP (object-oriented programming). We’ve also seen individuals without a technical background succeed if they have the right problem-solving mindset! Beyond the technical side, you also want to look for individuals who can provide consulting to your business team. Mendix development is quick and Agile, and you need someone who can speak to not only the technical side of Mendix but also the business side at the same time in order to prevent project bottlenecks.

2. Mendix partner

   a. Bring in 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.

3. Mendix Expert Services

   a. Our team of experts are here to support you! We have many options for enabling your team and helping you quickly demonstrate the power of Mendix.

   Choosing Expert Services is the right option if you plan on building out your internal team and need enablement and support alongside application development. Expert Services can help prove the value of the Mendix internally while simultaneously coaching your team on how to continue with the application(s).

4. Hybrid a. 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.

Summary

By now you should have finalized your getting started plan, and are ready to start your first application development! How exciting!

You’ve done a great job so far and learned a lot along the way. By now you should have:

• Define the goals and objectives you want to achieve by using Mendix within your team or organization.

• Added your first ideas into your portfolio board and prioritized them.

• Chosen your first application to develop and defined its value and purpose.

• Identified the most suitable deployment option for this first application.

And

• Decided who will help you build this app.

• Established the necessary components for your Program Kick-Off meeting with business & IT leadership

Time to start putting everything you’ve prepared into practice!

Start Your Mendix Program

In this section, you will learn all you need to know to kick-off your Mendix program.

Learning Objectives

By now, you are familiar with what you can do with Mendix in your organization and have finalized your getting started plan. Now, it’s time to kick-off your Mendix program!

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Explain the benefits of using the agile framework to work with Mendix

• Build your first Mendix project team

• Arrange Academy training for your team

• Organize a successful program kick-off

Introduction to Agile

What is the Agile Framework?

Defining and honing your development process is a critical factor in program success. By nature of low-code, the Agile Framework is the best way to work with Mendix.

Understanding how to work in Agile allows organizations to stay responsive to change and reduce time-to-market by nearly 50%. Mendix highlights these benefits by providing capabilities such as sprints, story management, and integrated feedback management within the platform itself.

In the Academy, you can find an Agile Awareness Learning Path that you can use to train your team in the Agile Framework and how it will define your Mendix journey.

Identify Your First Mendix Project Team

This section addresses how you set up your first Mendix Project Team. Ensuring you have the right people in the right roles is a critical step in successfully getting started. Everyone participating should be interested and enthusiastic about learning how to leverage this powerful platform, how to constantly improve collaboration and best practices across roles and groups within the BizDevOps model, and how the work they’ll be doing will bring value to the end users and the overall organization.

Setting up your Agile Scrum team

To work in Mendix, we recommend working in an Agile Scrum Team that is already familiar with the Agile Framework (if needed, refer to this Agile Awareness Learning Path).

This framework allows development teams to collaborate better, respond to change, and continuously incorporate user feedback.

It’s important to have small cross-functional teams to make sure that knowledge of all aspects is available within the team with all roles being covered. If needed, a person can take on multiple roles as long as they have the skills, expertise, and time to commit to each role. Ideal Scrum Teams are composed of 5-7 people, never exceeding nine for larger enterprises.

Getting all the required knowledge in each team might be difficult while keeping your team small, efficient, and aligned. Mendix considers a Scrum team as a juncture of a core team and accelerators.

Core Team:

• Product Owner (PO): responsible for defining the direction of a project. They have a clear understanding of what the business and users need from the product being developed and the value to be delivered. They translate these needs to the Scrum team. The PO:

  • Is a liaison between the business and the development team to build, prioritize, and manage the backlog to drive production forward.

  • Ensures the product being developed delivers the required value for the business and users.

  • Accepts or rejects the completed work Ideal POs have these five key skills & characteristics.

• Scrum Master (SM): ensures that the team follows Agile best practices and oversees addressing and removing any productivity blockers that may come up. Essentially, the Scrum master is the authority in Agile and Scrum to keep the team working together efficiently and effectively. SMs:

  • Should be supportive leaders.

  • Help POs define the product’s value, plan work, and manage the backlog.

  • Help developers self-organize.

• Development Team: consists of the people who actually build the app. They are responsible for turning the requirements into functionality, based on the input provided by the Product Owner. The development team:

  • Is comprised of one or more people with the skills needed to build the product as envisioned by the PO.

  • May be comprised of non-developers and traditional developers alike: architects, writers, technical BAs, designers, and other specialized roles can all be part of the development team.

  • Work with the SM in the key Scrum activities of sprint planning, sprint review, retrospectives and daily standups to keep their assigned tasks on track with high-quality code during each sprint, while working towards continuous improvement as a team.

Accelerators:

• BAs or SMEs get involved when a team requires detailed knowledge about such subjects as UX/UI, QA, testing and integration.

• The Business Owner is the primary stakeholder who is ultimately responsible and accountable for the end-result of the project and product including the actual value delivered.

• Stakeholders are the end-users of the product under development, represent strategical, tactical, and operational levels of the business.

Your team does not have to fit this exact mold, but it is important that all the responsibilities outlined here are covered to ensure success in your low-code program. Here’s a typical team structure:

Additional Resources

• Learn more about the Agile team, roles and responsibilities in this lecture of the Agile Awareness Learning Path.

• Find additional content on our Mendix blog, like this article on How to Structure an Agile Scrum Team.

Arrange Academy Training for Your Team

As you begin to map out your Mendix team, it’s important to establish a training plan. Properly training your Mendix team helps accelerate your time to first value and promotes long-term low-code success. It helps each team member take charge of their own success and the overall team’s success.

Take the time to familiarize yourself with the Mendix Academy. Here, we provide a variety of learning paths and individual courses for various roles and diverse backgrounds to allow you to customize the learning journey appropriate for each team member and role. Once you are familiar with the various guides, diverse topics and individual courses, create a training plan with each team member based on their role and experience.

Here is a sample you can use as a template:

This will vary based on the specific people taking each role. A Scrum Master who used to be a full-stack developer could take the Crash Course instead of the Become a Rapid Developer course. Your EA may need to add Native Mobile or Configure Advanced Security for your particular organization, project and team needs. Your Mendix team is happy to help create your training plan.

Mendix Certificates

Mendix provides four different certification levels to measure developer maturity, each with an increasing level of required skill and experience:

Rapid Developer Certification

A Rapid Developer has a baseline knowledge of the Mendix platform and knows where to find information using the documentation and the Mendix community.

This certification is proof of basic Mendix knowledge and demonstrates that someone can join a project team and independently build prototypes.

The Rapid Developer certification is a minimum requirement for working in Mendix. Before taking a certification exam, there is required coursework for each level. All courses can either be taken via instructor-led or via a self-led.

You can find all the details about the certification, as well as the required coursework here.

As your team grows and takes on more projects, it’s important to continue to also level up on your Mendix expertise. Proper enablement will allow your team to take on more complex projects and deliver more business impact. When able, remember to take the time to level up on your Mendix Certification.

Intermediate Developer Certification

An Intermediate Developer has the fundamental knowledge of the Mendix platform to start building the next great apps. This certification is proof that someone is ready to be added to operating teams and can contribute from the start by applying your knowledge and skills in different parts of the project development lifecycle.

You can find information as well as required courseware for the Intermediate certification here.

Advanced Developer Certification

An Advanced Developer has the knowledge and skills required to build production-ready applications. This certification is proof of someone’s advanced knowledge of the platform and their professional experience with developing Mendix apps.

You can find information as well as required courseware for the Advanced certification here.

Expert Developer Certification

The Expert Developer Certificate is not only proof of Mendix knowledge, it confirms a developer’s expertise and shows they have applied what they know about Mendix in their day-to-day job.

You can find information as well as required courseware for the Advanced certification here.

Organize Your Program Kick-Off

The program kick-off is important to hold before the project kick-off as this meeting ensures alignment across all groups and team members involved, from leadership to the development team, on goals, vision, and value. This meeting sets the foundation for bridging business and IT as you begin your Mendix journey.

Who should be there?

Make sure to include the relevant business and IT leaders, project team members, other stakeholders, Mendix and/or Mendix partner team members. If your executive sponsor could also be there, that would be amazing.

What’s the agenda?

A sample agenda of a successful program kickoff can include:

• A round of introductions

• Why Mendix was chosen

• Business and IT alignment on:

  • Organizational challenges and needs Mendix is solving (this is where your low-code vision will be very important — you always need to be able to tie Mendix work back to the larger business needs)

  • An overview of Mendix vision and strategy for your organization

    • Goals and success at both the organizational and project levels

    • Important milestones

    • Value measurement and impact

  • Identify initial concerns or challenges and build mitigation plans(s)

• Establish a cadence for this group to meet going forward for a business review - quarterly, every other month, monthly, etc.

Summary

Amazing, you should have kicked-off your Mendix Program by now! During this phase you:

• Made sure the right Expert Leads and Stakeholders needed for your Mendix program are involved.

• Familiarized with the agile framework and its benefits, and decided whether or not to use this way of working.

• Built your first Mendix project team and arranged Academy training based on their role and needs.

• Planned a successful program kick-off.

You are now ready to move to the next phase. Good job!

Governance and Control in Mendix

In this section, you will get a quick view on the features we offer to incorporate governance in your process. We will show you in detail which of these you need to configure at the start, so the platform supports your organization’s onboarding.

Learning Objectives

Now that you have kicked-off your Mendix Program, it’s time to familiarize with the features Mendix offers to incorporate governance in your process.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Recognize the options Mendix offers to tailor the platform to your specific governance needs
• Identify the required steps to Configure the Platform in Control Center

Introduction to Governance in Mendix

Low-code governance is about having oversight and maintaining control over both a landscape of apps and individual app development. It provides guardrails for your development process and brings resources together to achieve the enterprise’s objectives. Increase accountability, increase transparency, and get the most ROI out of what your teams build and deploy. It will help you maximize business value at acceptable risk and cost. Knowing the broad strokes capabilities of the Mendix platform early on helps in getting solid early successes.

When you start, the governance responsibility will probably be in the hands of your Mendix admin, but as your Mendix landscape grows you may want to define a Center of Excellence. Admins can use Control Center, a dashboard that gives you an overview of various company activities on the Mendix platform, to manage many of the aspects of landscape governance.

There are several advanced capabilities in the Control Center to help you manage your app landscape as it grows.

• Dashboard provides insight into some KPIs of how your company is advancing.

• Apps provides easy visibility into all apps, environments, their deployment status, technical contact, version, and more.

• Health dashboard provides an insight into the running status of your app landscape.

• Entitlements shows the resources you’ve bought and used.

• You can add, resize or remove environments in the Deployed apps view.

• Additional curation settings are available for Marketplace, Portfolios, and Data Catalog, which apply to all your developers.

New capabilities are released regularly, so exploring Control Center regularly is always a good idea!

But as you can tell from the slide below, governance touches many aspects of the development cycle and it’s not just confined to control center.

If you would like to learn more about our governance features, you can check out the Control Center Guide, Control Center Learning Path, or the Mendix documentation. You probably already involved your subject matter experts while you were evaluating Mendix, so they might want to do a deeper dive.

A lot of these options will become more relevant for you as you scale your Mendix portfolio, so for now, we will just point to a couple of key settings that are important for getting started and launching your first app.

Configure the Platform in Control Center

The Mendix platform has a few options to tailor the platform to your specific governance needs.

Claim additional email domains

If your company has more than one email domain, all your email domains should be claimed, such as: MyCompany.com, MyCompany.nl, MyCompany-SpecialUnit.com etc. This is to ensure all users that do a signup with an email address on any of these domains all end-up in the same ‘company’ on the Mendix platform. If you don’t do this from the start, your users may create projects in different ‘companies’/tenants on the Mendix platform, which is hard to govern and may require cumbersome merging activities later.

You can read more about that, here.

Assign a security contact

Provide a specific Security Contact who is informed if there are critical security issues with the Mendix platform and platform-supported Marketplace components. Mendix strongly recommends applying a team email address or a functional mailbox instead of a personal individual email address.

Your security contact person(s) may want to subscribe the Mendix Security Advisories to get familiar with the process around security fixes.

Additional reading

Define company brand and description

On the Company Brand page, you can upload, edit, or remove a Company Logo. The company logo uploaded here will appear across the platform where it is used. For instance, it will be displayed on your published Marketplace content.

Additional reading

Setup IDP or SSO for access to the Mendix platform

It is recommended that you set-up SSO between the Mendix platform and your corporate IDP such as Microsoft Entra ID (f.k.a. Azure AD) or Okta. This will put your IDP in control of how users are authenticated before they can access your content on the Mendix platform. Leavers (former employees) will not be able to login. Your platform users get the convenience of Single Sign-On, rather than yet-another-password. See also our BYOIDP blog.

Optionally, you may set up access rules in your IDP to control which of your employees can and cannot work on the Mendix platform. As we encourage collaboration in multi-disciplined teams, be careful not to be too restrictive or not apply any restriction at all. For example, potential end-users of Mendix apps may want to contribute to development teams. In a later stage you can set up restrictive access rules as you start putting more business-critical IPs in the logic of your Mendix apps.

Setup password policy

If you don’t enable SSO, you will want to specify if the user passwords expire or not. If you do not want the passwords to expire, toggle Passwords of company members never expire to On.

Summary

Now that you know how Mendix can be tailored to your own governance needs, you are ready to get your first project started! You will find all the useful information to do this in the following section.

Get Started With Your First Project

In this section, you will get all the information you need to know to help you get started with your first Mendix project.

Learning Objectives

It’s now time to begin your first Mendix project! How exciting!

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Organize your first project kick-off

• Create your project

• Ensure project access for all of your team members

• Set up the agile way of working

• Define requirements for your first project

• Identify continuous collaboration that you can leverage through Mendix

Organize Your First Project Kick-off

Now that the program is properly kicked off, the next step is to organize the kick-off for your first project. Kick-off meetings are a great way to communicate key project information to your team and give them an opportunity to ask questions. You might also want to have your key stakeholders in the same (physical or virtual) room.

A sample agenda for a successful project kickoff might include:

• Introduction: Make sure everyone knows each other.

• The background of the project i.e. why are you doing it in the first place? (Go back to your application value definition and simply present the most important points to your team).

• What is the project scope: You might not have your MVP scope defined in the kick-off meeting and that’s okay. What is important is to have a clear understanding of the problem you are solving and what the most crucial aspect of that problem to tackle first.

• Who’s doing what: Here every team member should have a clear understanding of their roles and responsibilities (in the context of the scrum framework as well as in general).

• How are you going to work together: Establish your agile rituals (standups, refinements, reviews, retrospectives) and decide who should be attending and how often. In general, all team members will be coming to all the rituals, but your stakeholders will not. The only thing that is super important for your stakeholders to attend is the sprint review.

• What does success look like: How will you know if you have delivered value? These could be project milestones, but also metrics you would like to influence.

Create Your Project and Make Sure Everyone Has Access

Anyone can sign up to the Mendix platform using their business email address, so there is no need to on-board a specific list of users. All they need to do is go to signup.mendix.com and use the relevant company email domain (any from the list you have added in section 5.2).

If you are working with implementation partners, you need to decide how to give those team members access to your app projects.

You may take one of the following approaches:

• One possibility is to invite external users to your app projects using their external email address (e.g. Joan@MyMendixPartner.com).

• Another possibility is to create accounts for them in your company’s Entra ID (or similar IdP such as Okta).

Create your first app!

And now that everyone has a Mendix account, this is the moment you’ve all been waiting for — it’s time to actually create your first app! Anyone from your team can click the Create App button on the Mendix platform, just make sure they are logged in with an email address from your company domain.

Once the project is created, everyone from the team should get access to it as well as their appropriate role. This is the overview of the default project roles on the Mendix platform:

Setting up the Agile Way of Working

Sprint Zero is all about laying the groundwork for a successful project by focusing on planning and preparation rather than immediately jumping into development. It might seem like this is a whole lot of process while the team is ready to get to building, but especially for your first project, it is crucial to set up the right process, get everyone comfortable with it and define the initial requirements — this will absolutely speed you up very soon.

Let’s start by setting up your agile ways of working. You might have defined some things already in your project kick-off, so you can start by revisiting that. Moving forward, you also need to determine which Agile practices will become your organizational standard: this could be Scrum (the Mendix platform is optimized for Scrum at team level), Kanban, or other variants. Creating a standard doesn’t mean that all teams will be forced to work in exactly the same way, but having a shared set of practices will increase mobility between teams. The more familiar and standardized this methodology is across your organization, the tighter the collaboration will be amongst teams as team members understand expectations and roles.

However, it should be noted that your agile methodology should remain lightweight and flexible to keep administrative burden as low as possible while maximizing the benefits to your organization. The way of working should suit the team’s needs, so that they can get the best out of themselves. Take a pragmatic approach so that this can be discovered progressively.

Regardless of Agile methodology, some of the practices that you can consider standardizing are:

• Sprint 0 (or design sprints)

• Daily stand-ups

• Sprint planning

• Backlog refinement

• Product demos

• Team retrospectives

Care should be taken to incorporate feedback from team retrospectives and other Agile ceremonies into your standards as part of your continuous improvement process. That includes reviewing and analyzing any shortcuts taken or other deviations from the standard process to understand why it was necessary and potentially consider adapting your standards or putting another appropriate measure in place.

Development teams can work most efficiently if requirements are clearly described (e.g. in user stories), to estimate the effort and implementation. Because of this, it is important that you choose a tool in which these can be tracked. The Mendix platform offers a collaborative tool called Epics, in which this is possible. Here you can manage the backlog, epics, create user stories, and of course sprints. Both the Agile and Kanban methods are supported.

An organization that is familiar with the Agile way of working will likely already use related tools, such as Jira. Jira is often used for Scrum projects, which is why it is now possible to link Jira to your Mendix Project. The Scrum Master of the project can choose between Epics or Jira in the Settings part of the project navigation, in the Project Management tab.

Make sure that the tool and process you choose supports close collaboration between the product owner, developers, users, and other stakeholders. The tool should enable clear visibility and tracing between user stories, implementation, feedback, and deployments. Team members unfamiliar with your chosen tool may also need additional training to maximize use of the tool.

Defining Requirements

If at all possible, make sure the development team talks to the future end-users — this is what sprint zero is for. The team needs to understand what the app will be used for, what problem it is supposed to solve, how that problem is being solved now, and what can be improved.

When defining requirements, try to not take things at face value. Your stakeholders might have a clear list of requirements, but always start by making sure that you have a shared understanding of the problem (this is what the part about defining application value was for). Then look at the various ways you can help solve that problem — maybe that first idea is not always the best one, and the way things have always been done can be adapted for maximum efficiency.

Once the team has enough information, they should list the key features and functionalities that the application will offer. This could include data entry forms, workflow automation, reporting tools, or any other capabilities that align with the application’s purpose. Think about what the user needs to be able to do and how.

Next step is to prioritize features based on their importance to achieving the primary goal. Remember, a minimum viable product is all about achieving that initial value. Just because something is not a part of that scope, does not mean it’s considered unimportant or that it will not get done. Often things your stakeholders, or even end-users consider crucial are things they can probably live without for a couple of weeks. And if done right, your team will have a rhythm that ensures they consistently continue delivering value.

Standard Requirements and Reusability

There will always be requirements that are repeated for each and every application you build, things like access management or standardized navigation, or maybe things that each app you build needs to have which are specific to your business. If you already see things like that, note them down and think about whether it makes sense to add them to your standard company app template, or maybe to invest in creating a reusable component, which will save you time in the long run. It’s also okay to move quickly for this first app and look into reusability later, some of our most successful customers started like that!

Here is a couple of topics to keep in mind:

End user login

Every app will need a way for your end users to get access to it. We advise to use the OIDC SSO module for (B2E) apps you are developing. This is a sensible default as it is the easiest and most flexible approach for Single Sign-On and is supported by Microsoft’s Entra ID and most other IdPs. As an alternative you may advise SAML (e.g. for regulated B2C-apps) or LDAP for on-prem apps or the Forgot My Password module for non-SSO apps.

Familiarize with the Marketplace

Low-code development may be fast, but using modules or content from the Marketplace may even be faster. You may find modules relevant to your portfolio or your first app in particular and create a shortlist for your teams. Marketplace content may be supported by Mendix, Mendix partners or by the Mendix community.

Familiarize Yourself With Continuous Collaboration Through Mendix

One of the core values of the Mendix platform is continuous collaboration between business and IT. We have already shown you how that works in practice when it comes to aligning on wider strategic objectives (your low-code vision), program goals as well as your project goals. Now it’s time to see how it all works throughout the application development lifecycle.

It all starts with your portfolio. You have already added a couple of initiatives in it, but now that you have the MVP scope of your first application, add it in as a separate initiative and describe or link to documentation showing what needs to be delivered exactly and why.

You also have your application, so now you can link it to the initiative. To do this, you just need to select Edit initiative and start typing your app name to select it from the dropdown.

If you are using Epics as your agile planning tool, you will be able to link the right epics to this initiative. This means that anyone who opens that initiative in Portfolio Management will be able to see development progress on the epic level.

Another important part of collaboration in the application development lifecycle is the collaboration between the development team and their end users. Mendix makes that super easy using the feedback module. Your app users just need to click the Feedback button in your app and tell you what they like, need or miss, and your development team will be able to immediately respond. Once your app is live, the team will be able to set up a mini-survey to ask for user satisfaction, or get more targeted input by asking specific questions. Here you can read more on the importance of user feedback for application development.

The Development Process Itself and Why That’s Not a Part of This Guide

We have created this guide in order to help anyone who is in charge of implementing Mendix in their organization to hit the ground running.

The end goal of this phase is to bring your first app to life, but if you are working on managing the Mendix program, odds are you will not be the person actually developing the app itself. Rather, your job is to enable the set up of everything, focus on the 5 P’s, and empower the development team to focus on development only.

There are many dedicated resources on the platform to help new (or seasoned developers) get the most out of Mendix.So for the sake of your time, this guide’s length, and your sanity, let us skip a few steps ahead and pretend that the application is now almost ready.

Summary

By now most probably your first application has been developed and is ready for launch! You’ve learned how to kick off your project and have ensured access for all stakeholders involved. You’ve also laid the foundation for establishing an Agile way of working and made sure there is a clear understanding of project requirements shared amongst all stakeholders. Also, you are aware of what tools are in place to support continuous collaboration that you can leverage through Mendix.

Time to move on and prepare for launching your first application!

Launching Your First Application

You’ve come a long way, and it is time to launch your first application. This section covers all you need to know at this stage.

Learning Objectives

Well done, you’ve gone a long way and learned a lot through the process! It’s time to launch your first application. Exciting!

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Identify the different options available to test your application
• Describe the ways to promote your application
• Recognize the importance and options to maintain and upgrade your application

Deploy Your Application

Deploy your application to Mendix Cloud

Deploying your application to Mendix Cloud is a simple process, that will give you access to all the features and services in Mendix Cloud. It requires only a few steps to set it up, which you only need to do once for each application. Once the cloud settings of your application is done, you can deploy and redeploy your application with just one click.

Note that Mendix also offers other deployment options than Mendix Cloud e.g. to a private cloud if that’s a requirement.

Obtain a licensed node

You can deploy your application for free on Mendix Cloud. These Free Apps have limitations when it comes to run time, features and resources. You can publish Free Apps to test the Mendix platform, a specific feature of to quickly prototype an application to test an idea. Once you decide to take your application to the next-level and start serious development on it, you will need to obtain a licensed node, so this is something you will need to do before your launch.

If you have an existing contract that allows for more licensed nodes, you can request a new licensed node. If you don’t have a contract, or if your contract doesn’t allow for more licensed nodes, contact your Customer Success Manager.

Link your application to your licensed node

If you have a licensed node available, you can link your application to this licensed node. If your application was published as a Free App, you will have to unlink the application from the Free App environment first. This will delete all data on that Free App environment. So, before you unlink your Free App, back up the data first, if you require it.

If you have backed up your data, you can unlink your application from the Free App environment.

When your app is unlinked from a Free App environment, you can link it to a licensed node. By linking it to a licensed node, you get access to all the features of Mendix Cloud, such as one-click deployment from Studio Pro and our platform, log management, backups management and monitoring tools.

Set node permissions

Once you have linked your application to a licensed node, your team needs to determine what users can perform what actions on the node.

Who can configure an environment, who can deploy to an environment, who has access to the logs of an environment, etc. All of that is controlled by node permissions.

By default, only the Technical Contact of a node has permissions to perform any action on the licensed node. The Technical Contact can grant permissions to other members of the app team.

Granting permissions to team members is dependent on your deployment strategy and process: do you have DevOps teams where the developers also deploy and monitor the apps? Or does your company have separate Ops teams, where the deployment is done by people other than the developers? You can set node permissions for each of the environments of your node, so you can grant developers to deploy the app to the Test environment, but restrict deployment permissions for the Production environment to a smaller team.

Set cloud settings

When the node permissions are set up, you can start configuring your cloud settings. This can be done by any team member with the correct permissions. Changing your cloud settings is not mandatory, as most of settings are set for you by default in Mendix Cloud, but in some cases you want to customize them to tailor the end user experience or to adhere to company standards.

Things can you can customize for your applications in Mendix Cloud include:

• Studio Pro deployment target

• Custom domains

• HTTP headers

• Path-based access restrictions

• Environment variables

• Services, such as the Event Broker service

Deploy your application

Once you have linked and configured your Mendix Cloud node, which you only have to do once, you can start deploying your application to Mendix Cloud. It is recommended that you deploy any new version of your application to the Test or Acceptance environment of your application first for testing, before deploying it to the Production environment.

There are multiple ways to deploy your application to Mendix Cloud, so there is always a deployment flow that fits your needs. You (or your team) can get a complete overview of those in Deploying an App to Mendix Cloud.

Test Your Application

Mendix has a module that allows developers to write and execute Unit Tests: the UnitTesting module in Marketplace. With the UnitTesting module, critical parts of the application can be tested.

There are a variety of tools available for testing, from Mendix-supported ones to third-party ones. Read more about Test Automation and Quality Assurance.

Aside from unit tests, performance tests can also be performed with multiple third-party tools, such as JMeter, BlazeMeter and LoadRunner—all of which are capable of testing the performance of your Mendix application.

After go-live, Mendix Cloud offers metrics and logs to provide insights into application performance and can help track down bugs.

User Acceptance Testing

Before launching your first application, it is important to thoroughly test the application, not just in terms of bug bashing, but also to make sure it fulfills end user needs. That is why User Acceptance Tests should be performed before any go-live. What does that mean? It’s simple — always get your end users to actually try out the app before the go-live. This will give you the chance to catch any last-minute bugs and make sure your app is meeting (and exceeding) user expectations.

Mendix feedback module makes it super easy to organize user acceptance tests, all you need to do is to select the environment you want to do this in, make sure the feedback module is set up there, inform your end-users that you need their help and give them information on how to log in and how to provide feedback (maybe you want them to test specific scenarios you would give them on advance, or just let them play around themselves and give feedback on anything they notice might need to be changed). Then your development team will be able to fix any issues and respond to questions that might arise. Keep in mind that they might need extra time to tackle this feedback, so be sure you get user input at least a week before your planned go live date, preferably even longer.

Launch and Promote Your Application

Congratulations! If you made it this far, you’ve most likely launched your first Mendix app and have already started delivering value for your organization. You’ve probably tried doing things a bit differently than before and your team, as well as your whole organization, learned a lot along the way. To ensure continued success, here are a couple of things you need to think about now.

Celebrate your first launch

Yes, you absolutely need to celebrate. Here are some tips to maximize the impact of your internal celebration:

• Throw a party and invite as many people as possible, not just your development team.

• Host the party in a central location so that other departments take notice.

• People love cake. To be more specific: people love free 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 containers. 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.

• Here’s who you can consider inviting to celebrate with you:

  • Project team

  • Business stakeholders

  • Stakeholders from other lines of business

  • IT leaders

  • Mendix Expert Services or the Partner that helped guide the team through the project

But it doesn’t stop there. You need to continue talking about your first success. This part might feel like shameless promotion, and it might not come naturally to you or your team, but trust us, it’s vital and it works. Some of our most successful customers went on to share their success story in the form of a blog for your company website or intranet, a video, a podcast or at the very least a value one-pager that can be shared across your organization. Trust us, it’s worth it.

After the Launch

Establish a retrospective cadence

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 that their input is vital to improving future projects. Seek their advice on how to develop a more structured rapid application development 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 enthusiastic?” 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 that they can have a significant impact on the project —they will quickly embrace this new approach.

Make sure to do a team retrospective as well, these are some of the points you can consider:

• What went well?

• What didn’t go well?

• Who really excelled in the project and can take on the Mendix developer lead role/advance their certification level?

• How can you use this information to refine your process for the next project?

Document and measure the value of the application

Remember those goals you outlined when you initially defined the value of your application? Now is the time to go back to them and see if you have reached them or are on track to reach them.

It might take a bit of time to capture enough data to be able to draw conclusions, but always make sure the value the app brought about is captured. This might include things like generating additional revenue or maybe saving costs by sunsetting existing legacy apps, automating previously manual processes, or simply delivering a new application faster than you would with traditional development. It could even be something like improving your customer satisfaction or engagement. Whatever it is, make sure you have measured it and will continue to measure it. This will also be important when the time comes for you to define the value of your second and third app.

Maintain and Upgrade Your Applications

Platform: Maintaining your Mendix App

After developing and publishing your first Mendix app, it’s important to put proper maintenance measures in place. Establishing a regular upgrade practice [DB37][UT38]will help keep your app up to date with support and retain access to the latest features.

Mendix supports three major versions at a time. For example, today Mendix supports major versions 8, 9, and 10. When the next version (11) is released, then version 8 will sunset, and versions 9, 10, and 11 will be supported.

Learn more about version details and release timelines.

Summary

Your first application is launched, and you now know all about testing, launching, and promoting your application as well as the importance of continuous improvement, maintenance and upgrades. It was a long journey, but you made it!

Conclusion

Congratulations, you’ve made it to the end of this journey, and your first Mendix application has been launched! You’ve learned a lot along the way. The resources you’ve explored will also be very helpful during the next phases of your journey. You’ve made a great start and are ready to keep a successful journey going with Mendix.

By now you are familiar with the Mendix ecosystem and the importance of the 5 P’s of Digital Transformation. You know how to create an action plan, and successfully manage your Mendix program and are ready to keep managing and adding value to your portfolio.

An exiting Mendix journey has just begun, and we hope this guide was a useful tool during your first steps!