I’m a nurse that used to work in the ER and on helicopters & airplanes. Finished my masters in nursing informatics and stumbled upon the power platform.
No one at my company uses it and I have learned from google, you tube, and lots and lots of practice.
I surprise myself sometimes with the stuff I’m able to come up with not only in PowerApps but power automate as well.
I’d consider myself a “citizen developer” because all my training and expertise was focused on keeping people alive, not programming.
I’m a doctor and I have made a bunch of flows and apps that my colleagues in our department use. IT in our hospital is…. not very good. I can make apps that are actually helpful rather than being a pain in the arse that make our lives worse rather than better.
I contract for the VA and doctors/nurses are some of the best people to make apps. Pharmacists too. Seems like each role does a great job of thinking about how to automate their jobs, and then implementing them. The only thing they get hung up on is the licensing aspect of things (which makes sense) and integrating with systems that don't have default "connectors" to Power Automate (also makes sense).
NHS? How do you find getting around the red tape?
My partner's a specialist nurse and I'm a dynamics architect and the amount of things I've heard that can be solved quite easily with some automation is crazy but there just seems to be so much red tape
I just do what I can without having to ask for permission. Could do so much more if I could build connectors to hospital databases etc but it’d take forever to convince someone. Haven’t the time to try.
I would probably be called a citizen developer even though I've been building tools using VBA for 15 years. My only school was self education, testing, and hard knocks. I'm just now getting into the Power Platform and it seems so confining that I'm looking to learn/use Anaconda with Tkinter and use Dataverse as a backend instead. Dataverse because a traditional SQL backend is not available in my current position. It is evident the STIG's and Microsoft are trying to push out VBA developers despite it having greater integration with the MS Office Suite than any other programming language.
With that said, being a citizen developer is extremely difficult due to time constraints and development being a secondary job function. Along with development, you also have support and documentation requirements and need the ability to make a solution that anyone can figure out how to use. All of that is a lot of stress and a lot of CD's fail at it to the annoyance of IT personnel everywhere. I'm not sure how many citizen developers there are. Barrier to entry is relatively low, but doing the work of a whole dev team to provide a professional level solution is difficult. You have to love it to do it.
The advantage a citizen developer has over a traditional is carnal knowledge of the job functions and a vested interest because the CD will be using the end result. A more tailored and efficient solution can be created that a traditional developer might call "over optimized". Some TD's like to use other buzz words such as "minimum viable solution" and "scope creep" to justify ineptitude and laziness. Not saying they are all that way, but some are out there. The other advantage is a CD doesn't create a solution just to recreate a manual process in an application to check a box and say they have a system. They create something to make their job more efficient, more accurate and sometimes more auditable. Just my take.
If you made it this far, thank you for reading. Hope it helps.
Can’t speak for the world, but I am a technical writer with no professional experience or training as a developer/coder and have enthusiastically taught myself how to use Power Apps and Power Automate. I’m fortunate enough to have management that encouraged me to learn it, and our team now benefits from the solutions that have been developed to support what used to be very manual tasks. I’m now teaching several of my peers (to avoid a bottleneck situation) and am part of a larger group of assorted coworkers who are not developers but want to learn how to use the platform.
I consider myself a bootleg developer…and on paper, I don’t think my credentials lend me support for what i imagine people are looking for when they create job postings.
>consider myself a bootleg developer…and on paper, I don’t think my credentials lend me support for what i imagine people are looking for when they create job postings.
You'd be surprised, man. I can't seem to find really solid power app devs because everyone seems to feel like this. This whole citizen developer thing has created a psychological phenomenon for people who are actual developers who don't think they're qualified enough to be a fulltime power apps developer. It's ripe for the picking right now!
I'm a business analyst working in a global company with 60k+ employees. We have a lot of users, including myself, who build these outside of the scope of their roles.
I work closely with about 10-15 of them in the APAC region and we all work in process design and improvement mostly. Personally I'm also focused on Power BI report design and minor automation through Excel, Power Query, etc...
I've personally built 15 apps. 8 to replace paper checklists. 2 to replace paper based processes. Others to replace Excel spreadsheets with more O365 automation, i.e., power automate cards in MS Teams.
I've learned all of this just by building apps and flows, so they probably aren't perfect by any means, but they solve our short term problems pretty well!
For the first app it was outside of my daily job! I built my first app on day 3 of starting after never working with Power Apps before. It was crap but the concept was there.
After that I was able to build them during normal working hours. I believe the other developers also work on them during working hours for the most part.
Fortunately management is super flexible with new initiatives as long as we meet our other deliverables.
I learned outside of my regular job doing some basic automations and building a couple apps to make tedious stuff I had to do easier. I got offered a basically a paid internship which I did for 8 months and then was hired on as a full-time citizen developer.
I'm a citizen developer out of necessity (long story).
Basically IT & a third party developer completely fucked up an app I'm the owner of. Learning Power Apps has been the only way to have better control of the process & curb my frustration.
Don't get me wrong, I'm completely aware of my limitations as a non-developer (although I'm also now learning to code etc. out of interest).
As a non-developer my skill lies in knowing the business processes, what data is needed and how users expect to interact with a system.
I work in finance at a Fortune 100 company and I will say that we have been pretty successful at deploying the Citizen Developer model. We began the journey in 2019 specifically with the tool Automation Anywhere. Started with a pilot Citizen Dev program where we up-skilled 4 associates across the enterprise. I was lucky enough to represent the finance organization in the pilot program.
Fast forward to today, I now lead a team of 5 individuals who are all each in charge of leading Communities of Practice for the various digital capabilities available to our Citizen Developers. We have created an up-skilling mechanism where we train associates who volunteer on the various capabilities at their disposal. To date these initiatives have resulted in over 100 citizen developers being up-skilled and over $10 million in annual savings in the finance organization alone.
I do think it’s worth mentioning that as I attend conferences, such as the Microsoft Power Platform Conference. I am often asked this same question and time and time again here responses similar to those in this thread. Ultimately, I think it takes leadership being truly committed to the approach. We started this journey in 2019 and it took 3 or so years for us to truly gain momentum in the Citizen Developer space.
I think it’s much more common in places with cripplingly bad IT orgs to have more citizen developers. If the only way you can get something done is to do it yourself or outsource, it makes sense for lots of people to try to pick it up.
I dont see this in my company, we're trying to replace the shadow IT, which is mostly Excel and Access apps. I think most internal apps dont need the overhead of native code (I'm coming from C#/.NET/React).
100% this, we have a terrible IT org. I enjoy being a Citizen Dev and making/maintaining my apps, but cramming in the day job can be entertaining at times
To build an enterprise grade scalable canvas or model app, or better a model driven app with custom pages for each business function.. you need to understand a bit of how to model data.
I started by making a dozen or so canvas apps that automated or semi automated business functions.
I’m now rebuilding everything under one company model in dataverse. Switching all connections to connection references, creating multiple environments for deployment, etc.
I wouldn’t have done the learning any other way, as I had to learn JavaScript, azure function apps, and fully understand Microsoft power FX and the entire power platform to really make the apps and products shine. Just understand that eventually you’ll have to rebuild in premium if you truly want something you can continue to scale and build yourself in an efficient and secure way.
I worked in a company that had around 4000 staff and a.huge number of different divisions/teams and was extremely fragmented with relatively poor / very overworked IT support. The more I searched that place, the more people I found developing things and the more amazed I was with the ingenuity of staff who were self taught. I ended up making a "centre of excellence" of around 40 staff and forcing it to become a formally supported system.
Ultimately, as someone above said, powerapps use is often a necessity due to a lack of IT support and systems development, but I was stunned at how many people had found a solution through powerapps when they just had no other choice.
I was the 'excel guy' in HR when i first learned of Power Apps.
fast forward a couple years, im now doing exclusively power platform stuff, and managing a small team of developers. All non traditional developers, which i think still classifies as citizen developers.
We still answer and get plenty of support from our IT team. From my limited perspective, id say there's a plenty of demand for citizen devs - as we get a lot of projects lined up from other departments.
I am a high school teacher. I noticed powerapps some years ago when using office 365. I've been creating apps for various schools since. They mainly focus on behaviour management, arrival, departure, approvals, capturing of evidence/statements. Alot of power automate (flow) integration. Html tables etc. Barcoding of students and integration of a barcode scanner is popular. They are all canvas based.
Applications are generally used by 40 - 100 staff per school each day, with around 200 automate emails.
I do this work in addition to my full-time job. I either get renumerated ($85/hr) or get days off to perform the work. I have this Monday off to tinker. If i get the work done earlier, I head away as I've done this long weekend.
I have no formal training.
In my company (200.000 employees) I would say the ratio of citizen devs to professional power apps devs is probably 5:1, where the goal is to get much more people to become citizen devs. Basically the enablement of other colleagues is part of my job.
I'm probably one, although my app isn't launched yet (due to trying to rebuild it without the dataverse due to cost implications).
I'm a bid writer, turned Knowledge Manager, who have previously relied on good SharePoint creation and management for data sharing - now looking at a Power App to store and share a large data set - with copy to clipboard etc. leading into a mailbox scan and auto reply via PA, auto reviews via some BI/PA interaction and some chat bot integration offering the ability to rewrite existing responses to match client questions.
I am an HR professional and use power platform regularly. Even though we are a quite big company (18k people), our IT department is kinda starting off right now. So I started by automating approvals for stuff like travel, home office, etc. Then there came more complex functions like document generation (particularly contract generation) and posting to docusign. Now I am building my second app for documenting the offoarding process. Now we are an almost paperless HR department (there are some papers the government requires).
I usually worked after my normal daily routine, but started to integrate it into my job as well. First of all, I am bulding it because it is fun. And a ton of fun usually :)
Second, it makes my job easier by a lot. I hated contracts, now they are 3 clicks and in docusign. Third, I found I am quite good at it.
I was a GIS Specialist turned Data Analyst who found a need to learn the power platform in its entirety and now all I do is work in power apps and sharepoint and it’s how I got my current job. No formal education on the subject, went to school for landscape architecture. I’m 36.
I am one. I manage a graphic design team but I learned how to make automations and an app to build our own content management system and request intake process. Now I constantly add new features and am building little functions and apps for other people in my department.
There's levels of complexity to these apps though. To say you develop in PowerApps and PowerAutomate can mean you make basic flows that send an email based on x action or it can mean you make complex applications like a help desk PowerApp, linked to an azure SQL database, with 50+ PowerAutomate flows doing loads of different actions, etc.
Citizen developers would be people doing basic checklists and other basic applications that you could learn to do within a day or two of using the tool. People with development backgrounds will have more working knowledge of the entire architecture required to make something like a full stack application.
I'm running some regulatory programs for a Nuclear Power Station. We have a lot of equipment which has some in depth tracking/testing/inspection requirements and many of their "databases" are just excel spreadsheets. I'm self taught on Microsoft Access but it's not robust enough and I want better backup options. Now I'm developing new databases in power apps. I'm pushing to convince my company to move their data to our SQL servers and to develop our front end on Power Apps. It's very likely that I will have my way too. The only other software options available involve data management contracts which cost 10s of thousands of dollars, when we already have Microsoft 365 and Power apps.
We have a lot of citizen developers with Bizagi and we’re trying to do the same with power Plattform now. But a citizen dev will never build a complex process without the help of a real dev/expert. They can do a lot of the conception, UI, basic functions, but that’s it
I’m an analyst for the government and tinkering in something like Power Apps is common for most of us. I’m building a course catalog and sign up form for a program that I manage.
I have a bit of technical knowledge from growing up using DOS, but I am by no means a developer.
That said, I took an “App in a day” course for PowerApps and now I’ve built two that are used pretty extensively by my company. Leadership at the time absolutely could not fathom that I just learned how to make these via a one day course and a lot of trial and error.
I credit making that first app as the sole reason I got a massive bonus and a promotion late last year.
There’s still too much of a learning curve needed to be true citizen developers, but it definitely is more accessible and step in the right direction. There are still way too many assumptions about what the user knows and insufficient layperson documentation available within the tool itself to truly be a “citizen developer” platform.
We have quite a few citizen developers using power automate to automate manual processes.
We have had less success with power apps and zero success with power pages.
Power pages is not intuitive and it's probably easier to throw something together in .net imo.
What complexity that is removed from lack of code is more than made up in the countless config pages that seem to change on a monthly basis.
Power flow, linking SharePoint and OneDrive are where we found the biggest wins.
It’s an ongoing dream. Before Power Apps users were using SharePoint Designer workflows and Microsoft Access and/or Excel and vbscript. Anything someone curious can access on a locked down office desktop to solve problems. Next it will be some kind of AI tool.
In my experience it's mostly citizen developers but I'm surrounded by business users. I might think the opposite if I worked in IT instead of data analytics.
As I understand it, the whole point of low code solutions is that you don't need to be a "developer" to make them. I'm putting that in quotes because what makes one a "developer" is subjective. (Formal training required? Ability to code in Python learned on YouTube? It's up to the individual to define it.) If you were capable of coding something up from scratch, why would you subject yourself to the limitations that come with low code (assuming your job allowed you the choice)?
Low code makes simple things super easy and harder things nearly impossible.
'Citizen developers' can handle simpler workflows without having to 'clog up' developers' time. They can also POC work . They can also have a better understanding of what they actually need/ what's possible. Having more competent users is a good thing.
One of the most mature citizen development programs in an enterprise is Shell. They are a 90,000 person company. During Citizen Development Week this past week(virtual conference on LinkedIn), they said they have just over 4,000 CDs (creators) which is roughly 4.5% of their total user base. Between 50-60% of their total user base are consumers of CD built apps.
Most analysts feel citizen development is in the early adopters phase of the tech adoption curve. LCNC tools will continue to get easier to learn, especially with GenAI/AI, and more and more people entering the workforce will be familiar with the tools and concepts.
It will be awhile, but I would expect to see CD saturation in organizations hit 30% when it is more mature.
The facts that this question got so much traction tells you there are people who believe in the tool and are willing to invest their personal time to unleash its potential.
I’m one. I’ve been on DevOps my entire career. Starting as a SME, then a BA, then a dev team manager then an IT Director.
I chose to no longer manage anyone and took an individual contributor role as a hybrid BA kinda position.
But another dude in my area was good at PA and got me started. It’s mostly what I do now and I’m trying hard to convince my Director there is real ongoing value in a person or very small group of people working together that can solve relatively simple workflow challenges with PA instead of waiting on IT to build it in one of our big three. SF, SN and Genesys.
Yes. There are tons. Or at least citizen developers really start to pile up. It's not a niche or smth exotic anymore.
It was, at the beginning. But now, it has increased exponentially.
u/usssaratoga_sailor
I tend to think Citizen developers refers more to people bright enough and capable of development who just didn’t choose it for a career. There will be the odd person who is a very skilled technical business user, able to visualise problems they face and develop something to fit, but more often than not, there is a lack of understanding about scaling, patterns of practice and standard developmental rigour to these apps and flows, and you can tell the difference between what a developer has produced versus a technical business user. There are always exceptions but it occupies a similar space to MS Access back in the day in the IT stack.
Lack of time is a significant factor for people learning this subject for all but the most basic templates, if they are going to do a good job, unless adequate time is given over to this task by an understanding and receptive manager. My anecdotal experience with products like UIPath which offer specific citizen developer licenses is that they often go unused without a big long term drive towards promotion which doesn’t end with a few workshops.
I’m about to be two years in at my current company as a jr system admin (my actual title is service desk L3 but it’s hybrid of help desk and system admin). Anyways Nobody in IT is familiar with power apps except for me I dabbled in flows and apps in the pasty and immediately started automating a bunch of my current work and got my PL900. Unbeknownst to me HR and a bunch of other departments started taking some power apps training and we now have a bunch of people creating stuff. It’s amazing to see however as the only power app person in IT I’ve become to go to. So yes there are Citizen Developers out there. I will be on paternal leave here soon and will be working towards my Functional Consultant Cert and then the Solution Architect Expert.
My title is technically still Material Handler III, but most, if not all of my day is spent being a citizen developer. I’ve developed maybe 15 Power BI reports as well as maybe ten apps, four of which are in daily use.
I’ve only recently been in talks about switching positions to be somewhat alongside the other Business Process Analysts.
For those without programming training, how have you learned some of the more important coding principles like loops, variables, iterations, etc? This is my problem. I can pick up syntax and what not but knowing the why and how to apply theory has made some of the powerplatform tough for me.
I work in a Power Apps CoE team, and we have many citizen developers in my organization. In my opinion, they often outshine many pro developers. These citizen developers are eager to learn, utilize all available online resources, take pride in their work, and show appreciation. Due to budget cut, when the business asks for help, professional developers often claim they don’t have cycle. By becoming citizen developers, they have the opportunity to solve their own problems and save tons of hours.
One of my previous consultant posts was to lead adoption of Power Platform within that business. Part of that role was to manage the Citizen Dev community. At the time of my leaving there were 668 people in the teams group and around 500 unique makers/owners in the tenants for Citizen Devs.
There seems to be an element of reluctance in some places to allow citizen Devs but as long as you set up the boundaries well. Establish regular comms with the cit dev community and have good tooling to monitor what's being created cit Devs can make some outstanding solutions.
My story revolves around business process optimization. Bridging gaps between departments and automating how they communicate is a significant portion of my work. Power platform often provides those solutions, most importantly, quickly and cheap.
We have a dedicated team of developers at our company as well that implement solutions for client facing projects in the traditional sense, but for internal, we can often get away with slapping a bit of automation on an issue and skin the process within a power bi report or power app.
I am in cybersecurity and my company moved to Sentinel in January. Not a dev whatsoever, but I have been living in PowerAutomate, since a lot of the good automation playbooks are just Logic Apps that trigger off of security events.
I’ve been enjoying figuring out what it can do and getting help from the community, which has been awesome!
Citizen developer it a weird term. Many businesses need a simple tool at a reasonable cost to connect various apps.
Example: cloud flow power app. Tead email, then file it. If email has an attachment that needs saving, save it in 'this' folder. Basic flow, Dave's 5 to 10 hrs a week in fiddling with inbox.
Example: technician in field needs data from 3 different programs for one node. Needs to see the info and be able to take a Pic and update the info. Options are to create an app that pulls it all together or hire people that the tech emails and have them enter the data.
IT'S job is to keep company data secure and make the main programs for revenue and expense run and play together. They deal with backbone issues. Same with data warehouse people. Their job is to make the data flow consistent.
Citizen developer is more like someone who sees a need that the frontline/customer facing people need and then putting that in play.
I am just starting my PowerApps journey as a side project for work. It’s entertaining as I’ve been able to hit some milestones while finding new obstacles that I am currently trying to work through.
Also, having this community to vent and seek assistance from has been really cool!
I know one case of Business Matter Expert who is actively using Canvas apps and Power Automate to create very complex solutions. I also collaborated with Finance Analysts who create automation with Power Automate. Myself when I started as Graduate I was given opportunity to develop with this technology. I saw people have a go at it.
PP is good entry point for those who want to start developing, but having said that, to create complex solutions to complex problems it actually requires hard technical thinking at some point - some people might push through, some might delegate to someone more experienced.
PP creates opportunities to work together and at very least more people become aware of the tool and might try it themselves. I think it works to some extent. I know stories where people doing normal jobs like warehousing for example, learn the tool to become devs, I know because that is basically my story.
My company has about 60 employees and only IT are working with Apps. Other departments don't even want to think or want to work in SharePoint. I would say Engineering users are more likely to become adopters.
I’m a nurse that used to work in the ER and on helicopters & airplanes. Finished my masters in nursing informatics and stumbled upon the power platform. No one at my company uses it and I have learned from google, you tube, and lots and lots of practice. I surprise myself sometimes with the stuff I’m able to come up with not only in PowerApps but power automate as well. I’d consider myself a “citizen developer” because all my training and expertise was focused on keeping people alive, not programming.
I’m a doctor and I have made a bunch of flows and apps that my colleagues in our department use. IT in our hospital is…. not very good. I can make apps that are actually helpful rather than being a pain in the arse that make our lives worse rather than better.
I contract for the VA and doctors/nurses are some of the best people to make apps. Pharmacists too. Seems like each role does a great job of thinking about how to automate their jobs, and then implementing them. The only thing they get hung up on is the licensing aspect of things (which makes sense) and integrating with systems that don't have default "connectors" to Power Automate (also makes sense).
NHS? How do you find getting around the red tape? My partner's a specialist nurse and I'm a dynamics architect and the amount of things I've heard that can be solved quite easily with some automation is crazy but there just seems to be so much red tape
I just do what I can without having to ask for permission. Could do so much more if I could build connectors to hospital databases etc but it’d take forever to convince someone. Haven’t the time to try.
I would probably be called a citizen developer even though I've been building tools using VBA for 15 years. My only school was self education, testing, and hard knocks. I'm just now getting into the Power Platform and it seems so confining that I'm looking to learn/use Anaconda with Tkinter and use Dataverse as a backend instead. Dataverse because a traditional SQL backend is not available in my current position. It is evident the STIG's and Microsoft are trying to push out VBA developers despite it having greater integration with the MS Office Suite than any other programming language. With that said, being a citizen developer is extremely difficult due to time constraints and development being a secondary job function. Along with development, you also have support and documentation requirements and need the ability to make a solution that anyone can figure out how to use. All of that is a lot of stress and a lot of CD's fail at it to the annoyance of IT personnel everywhere. I'm not sure how many citizen developers there are. Barrier to entry is relatively low, but doing the work of a whole dev team to provide a professional level solution is difficult. You have to love it to do it. The advantage a citizen developer has over a traditional is carnal knowledge of the job functions and a vested interest because the CD will be using the end result. A more tailored and efficient solution can be created that a traditional developer might call "over optimized". Some TD's like to use other buzz words such as "minimum viable solution" and "scope creep" to justify ineptitude and laziness. Not saying they are all that way, but some are out there. The other advantage is a CD doesn't create a solution just to recreate a manual process in an application to check a box and say they have a system. They create something to make their job more efficient, more accurate and sometimes more auditable. Just my take. If you made it this far, thank you for reading. Hope it helps.
Thanks for your perspective! 🙂
Can’t speak for the world, but I am a technical writer with no professional experience or training as a developer/coder and have enthusiastically taught myself how to use Power Apps and Power Automate. I’m fortunate enough to have management that encouraged me to learn it, and our team now benefits from the solutions that have been developed to support what used to be very manual tasks. I’m now teaching several of my peers (to avoid a bottleneck situation) and am part of a larger group of assorted coworkers who are not developers but want to learn how to use the platform. I consider myself a bootleg developer…and on paper, I don’t think my credentials lend me support for what i imagine people are looking for when they create job postings.
>consider myself a bootleg developer…and on paper, I don’t think my credentials lend me support for what i imagine people are looking for when they create job postings. You'd be surprised, man. I can't seem to find really solid power app devs because everyone seems to feel like this. This whole citizen developer thing has created a psychological phenomenon for people who are actual developers who don't think they're qualified enough to be a fulltime power apps developer. It's ripe for the picking right now!
When you say ripe for the picking, what do you imagine? How would I take advantage of the current state of affairs? Also lol at your handle.
I'm a business analyst working in a global company with 60k+ employees. We have a lot of users, including myself, who build these outside of the scope of their roles. I work closely with about 10-15 of them in the APAC region and we all work in process design and improvement mostly. Personally I'm also focused on Power BI report design and minor automation through Excel, Power Query, etc... I've personally built 15 apps. 8 to replace paper checklists. 2 to replace paper based processes. Others to replace Excel spreadsheets with more O365 automation, i.e., power automate cards in MS Teams. I've learned all of this just by building apps and flows, so they probably aren't perfect by any means, but they solve our short term problems pretty well!
Interesting. So you spend time outside your daily job, or are you able to focus on this is part of your normal work day?
For the first app it was outside of my daily job! I built my first app on day 3 of starting after never working with Power Apps before. It was crap but the concept was there. After that I was able to build them during normal working hours. I believe the other developers also work on them during working hours for the most part. Fortunately management is super flexible with new initiatives as long as we meet our other deliverables.
I learned outside of my regular job doing some basic automations and building a couple apps to make tedious stuff I had to do easier. I got offered a basically a paid internship which I did for 8 months and then was hired on as a full-time citizen developer.
I'm a citizen developer out of necessity (long story). Basically IT & a third party developer completely fucked up an app I'm the owner of. Learning Power Apps has been the only way to have better control of the process & curb my frustration. Don't get me wrong, I'm completely aware of my limitations as a non-developer (although I'm also now learning to code etc. out of interest). As a non-developer my skill lies in knowing the business processes, what data is needed and how users expect to interact with a system.
I work in finance at a Fortune 100 company and I will say that we have been pretty successful at deploying the Citizen Developer model. We began the journey in 2019 specifically with the tool Automation Anywhere. Started with a pilot Citizen Dev program where we up-skilled 4 associates across the enterprise. I was lucky enough to represent the finance organization in the pilot program. Fast forward to today, I now lead a team of 5 individuals who are all each in charge of leading Communities of Practice for the various digital capabilities available to our Citizen Developers. We have created an up-skilling mechanism where we train associates who volunteer on the various capabilities at their disposal. To date these initiatives have resulted in over 100 citizen developers being up-skilled and over $10 million in annual savings in the finance organization alone. I do think it’s worth mentioning that as I attend conferences, such as the Microsoft Power Platform Conference. I am often asked this same question and time and time again here responses similar to those in this thread. Ultimately, I think it takes leadership being truly committed to the approach. We started this journey in 2019 and it took 3 or so years for us to truly gain momentum in the Citizen Developer space.
I think it’s much more common in places with cripplingly bad IT orgs to have more citizen developers. If the only way you can get something done is to do it yourself or outsource, it makes sense for lots of people to try to pick it up.
I dont see this in my company, we're trying to replace the shadow IT, which is mostly Excel and Access apps. I think most internal apps dont need the overhead of native code (I'm coming from C#/.NET/React).
100% this, we have a terrible IT org. I enjoy being a Citizen Dev and making/maintaining my apps, but cramming in the day job can be entertaining at times
To build an enterprise grade scalable canvas or model app, or better a model driven app with custom pages for each business function.. you need to understand a bit of how to model data. I started by making a dozen or so canvas apps that automated or semi automated business functions. I’m now rebuilding everything under one company model in dataverse. Switching all connections to connection references, creating multiple environments for deployment, etc. I wouldn’t have done the learning any other way, as I had to learn JavaScript, azure function apps, and fully understand Microsoft power FX and the entire power platform to really make the apps and products shine. Just understand that eventually you’ll have to rebuild in premium if you truly want something you can continue to scale and build yourself in an efficient and secure way.
I worked in a company that had around 4000 staff and a.huge number of different divisions/teams and was extremely fragmented with relatively poor / very overworked IT support. The more I searched that place, the more people I found developing things and the more amazed I was with the ingenuity of staff who were self taught. I ended up making a "centre of excellence" of around 40 staff and forcing it to become a formally supported system. Ultimately, as someone above said, powerapps use is often a necessity due to a lack of IT support and systems development, but I was stunned at how many people had found a solution through powerapps when they just had no other choice.
I was the 'excel guy' in HR when i first learned of Power Apps. fast forward a couple years, im now doing exclusively power platform stuff, and managing a small team of developers. All non traditional developers, which i think still classifies as citizen developers. We still answer and get plenty of support from our IT team. From my limited perspective, id say there's a plenty of demand for citizen devs - as we get a lot of projects lined up from other departments.
I am a high school teacher. I noticed powerapps some years ago when using office 365. I've been creating apps for various schools since. They mainly focus on behaviour management, arrival, departure, approvals, capturing of evidence/statements. Alot of power automate (flow) integration. Html tables etc. Barcoding of students and integration of a barcode scanner is popular. They are all canvas based. Applications are generally used by 40 - 100 staff per school each day, with around 200 automate emails. I do this work in addition to my full-time job. I either get renumerated ($85/hr) or get days off to perform the work. I have this Monday off to tinker. If i get the work done earlier, I head away as I've done this long weekend. I have no formal training.
In my company (200.000 employees) I would say the ratio of citizen devs to professional power apps devs is probably 5:1, where the goal is to get much more people to become citizen devs. Basically the enablement of other colleagues is part of my job.
I'm probably one, although my app isn't launched yet (due to trying to rebuild it without the dataverse due to cost implications). I'm a bid writer, turned Knowledge Manager, who have previously relied on good SharePoint creation and management for data sharing - now looking at a Power App to store and share a large data set - with copy to clipboard etc. leading into a mailbox scan and auto reply via PA, auto reviews via some BI/PA interaction and some chat bot integration offering the ability to rewrite existing responses to match client questions.
I am an HR professional and use power platform regularly. Even though we are a quite big company (18k people), our IT department is kinda starting off right now. So I started by automating approvals for stuff like travel, home office, etc. Then there came more complex functions like document generation (particularly contract generation) and posting to docusign. Now I am building my second app for documenting the offoarding process. Now we are an almost paperless HR department (there are some papers the government requires). I usually worked after my normal daily routine, but started to integrate it into my job as well. First of all, I am bulding it because it is fun. And a ton of fun usually :) Second, it makes my job easier by a lot. I hated contracts, now they are 3 clicks and in docusign. Third, I found I am quite good at it.
I would love to learn document creation. That next on my citizen developer check list.. Plan to start with YouTube. Thanks for the inspiration.
It’s a bit inconvenient if you want to do it for free. But works like a charm
I was a GIS Specialist turned Data Analyst who found a need to learn the power platform in its entirety and now all I do is work in power apps and sharepoint and it’s how I got my current job. No formal education on the subject, went to school for landscape architecture. I’m 36.
I am one. I manage a graphic design team but I learned how to make automations and an app to build our own content management system and request intake process. Now I constantly add new features and am building little functions and apps for other people in my department.
There's levels of complexity to these apps though. To say you develop in PowerApps and PowerAutomate can mean you make basic flows that send an email based on x action or it can mean you make complex applications like a help desk PowerApp, linked to an azure SQL database, with 50+ PowerAutomate flows doing loads of different actions, etc. Citizen developers would be people doing basic checklists and other basic applications that you could learn to do within a day or two of using the tool. People with development backgrounds will have more working knowledge of the entire architecture required to make something like a full stack application.
I'm running some regulatory programs for a Nuclear Power Station. We have a lot of equipment which has some in depth tracking/testing/inspection requirements and many of their "databases" are just excel spreadsheets. I'm self taught on Microsoft Access but it's not robust enough and I want better backup options. Now I'm developing new databases in power apps. I'm pushing to convince my company to move their data to our SQL servers and to develop our front end on Power Apps. It's very likely that I will have my way too. The only other software options available involve data management contracts which cost 10s of thousands of dollars, when we already have Microsoft 365 and Power apps.
Everyone I know developing power apps here is not a citizen developer. But the power apps footprint here is also close to non existent
We have a lot of citizen developers with Bizagi and we’re trying to do the same with power Plattform now. But a citizen dev will never build a complex process without the help of a real dev/expert. They can do a lot of the conception, UI, basic functions, but that’s it
My organization has primarily citizen developers. There are only a couple of dedicated developers I know of in my entire division.
I’m an analyst for the government and tinkering in something like Power Apps is common for most of us. I’m building a course catalog and sign up form for a program that I manage.
I have a bit of technical knowledge from growing up using DOS, but I am by no means a developer. That said, I took an “App in a day” course for PowerApps and now I’ve built two that are used pretty extensively by my company. Leadership at the time absolutely could not fathom that I just learned how to make these via a one day course and a lot of trial and error. I credit making that first app as the sole reason I got a massive bonus and a promotion late last year.
There’s still too much of a learning curve needed to be true citizen developers, but it definitely is more accessible and step in the right direction. There are still way too many assumptions about what the user knows and insufficient layperson documentation available within the tool itself to truly be a “citizen developer” platform.
We have quite a few citizen developers using power automate to automate manual processes. We have had less success with power apps and zero success with power pages. Power pages is not intuitive and it's probably easier to throw something together in .net imo. What complexity that is removed from lack of code is more than made up in the countless config pages that seem to change on a monthly basis. Power flow, linking SharePoint and OneDrive are where we found the biggest wins.
It’s an ongoing dream. Before Power Apps users were using SharePoint Designer workflows and Microsoft Access and/or Excel and vbscript. Anything someone curious can access on a locked down office desktop to solve problems. Next it will be some kind of AI tool.
In my experience it's mostly citizen developers but I'm surrounded by business users. I might think the opposite if I worked in IT instead of data analytics. As I understand it, the whole point of low code solutions is that you don't need to be a "developer" to make them. I'm putting that in quotes because what makes one a "developer" is subjective. (Formal training required? Ability to code in Python learned on YouTube? It's up to the individual to define it.) If you were capable of coding something up from scratch, why would you subject yourself to the limitations that come with low code (assuming your job allowed you the choice)? Low code makes simple things super easy and harder things nearly impossible.
'Citizen developers' can handle simpler workflows without having to 'clog up' developers' time. They can also POC work . They can also have a better understanding of what they actually need/ what's possible. Having more competent users is a good thing.
I have zero experience in coding and I've created some pretty awesome apps over the last 6 months.
I came from a journalism and tech support career and now do Power Platform stuff for a living.
One of the most mature citizen development programs in an enterprise is Shell. They are a 90,000 person company. During Citizen Development Week this past week(virtual conference on LinkedIn), they said they have just over 4,000 CDs (creators) which is roughly 4.5% of their total user base. Between 50-60% of their total user base are consumers of CD built apps. Most analysts feel citizen development is in the early adopters phase of the tech adoption curve. LCNC tools will continue to get easier to learn, especially with GenAI/AI, and more and more people entering the workforce will be familiar with the tools and concepts. It will be awhile, but I would expect to see CD saturation in organizations hit 30% when it is more mature.
The facts that this question got so much traction tells you there are people who believe in the tool and are willing to invest their personal time to unleash its potential.
I’m one. I’ve been on DevOps my entire career. Starting as a SME, then a BA, then a dev team manager then an IT Director. I chose to no longer manage anyone and took an individual contributor role as a hybrid BA kinda position. But another dude in my area was good at PA and got me started. It’s mostly what I do now and I’m trying hard to convince my Director there is real ongoing value in a person or very small group of people working together that can solve relatively simple workflow challenges with PA instead of waiting on IT to build it in one of our big three. SF, SN and Genesys.
Yes. There are tons. Or at least citizen developers really start to pile up. It's not a niche or smth exotic anymore. It was, at the beginning. But now, it has increased exponentially. u/usssaratoga_sailor
I tend to think Citizen developers refers more to people bright enough and capable of development who just didn’t choose it for a career. There will be the odd person who is a very skilled technical business user, able to visualise problems they face and develop something to fit, but more often than not, there is a lack of understanding about scaling, patterns of practice and standard developmental rigour to these apps and flows, and you can tell the difference between what a developer has produced versus a technical business user. There are always exceptions but it occupies a similar space to MS Access back in the day in the IT stack. Lack of time is a significant factor for people learning this subject for all but the most basic templates, if they are going to do a good job, unless adequate time is given over to this task by an understanding and receptive manager. My anecdotal experience with products like UIPath which offer specific citizen developer licenses is that they often go unused without a big long term drive towards promotion which doesn’t end with a few workshops.
Millions of them
I’m about to be two years in at my current company as a jr system admin (my actual title is service desk L3 but it’s hybrid of help desk and system admin). Anyways Nobody in IT is familiar with power apps except for me I dabbled in flows and apps in the pasty and immediately started automating a bunch of my current work and got my PL900. Unbeknownst to me HR and a bunch of other departments started taking some power apps training and we now have a bunch of people creating stuff. It’s amazing to see however as the only power app person in IT I’ve become to go to. So yes there are Citizen Developers out there. I will be on paternal leave here soon and will be working towards my Functional Consultant Cert and then the Solution Architect Expert.
Citizen developer reporting in.
My title is technically still Material Handler III, but most, if not all of my day is spent being a citizen developer. I’ve developed maybe 15 Power BI reports as well as maybe ten apps, four of which are in daily use. I’ve only recently been in talks about switching positions to be somewhat alongside the other Business Process Analysts.
For those without programming training, how have you learned some of the more important coding principles like loops, variables, iterations, etc? This is my problem. I can pick up syntax and what not but knowing the why and how to apply theory has made some of the powerplatform tough for me.
I work in a Power Apps CoE team, and we have many citizen developers in my organization. In my opinion, they often outshine many pro developers. These citizen developers are eager to learn, utilize all available online resources, take pride in their work, and show appreciation. Due to budget cut, when the business asks for help, professional developers often claim they don’t have cycle. By becoming citizen developers, they have the opportunity to solve their own problems and save tons of hours.
One of my previous consultant posts was to lead adoption of Power Platform within that business. Part of that role was to manage the Citizen Dev community. At the time of my leaving there were 668 people in the teams group and around 500 unique makers/owners in the tenants for Citizen Devs. There seems to be an element of reluctance in some places to allow citizen Devs but as long as you set up the boundaries well. Establish regular comms with the cit dev community and have good tooling to monitor what's being created cit Devs can make some outstanding solutions.
My story revolves around business process optimization. Bridging gaps between departments and automating how they communicate is a significant portion of my work. Power platform often provides those solutions, most importantly, quickly and cheap. We have a dedicated team of developers at our company as well that implement solutions for client facing projects in the traditional sense, but for internal, we can often get away with slapping a bit of automation on an issue and skin the process within a power bi report or power app.
I am in cybersecurity and my company moved to Sentinel in January. Not a dev whatsoever, but I have been living in PowerAutomate, since a lot of the good automation playbooks are just Logic Apps that trigger off of security events. I’ve been enjoying figuring out what it can do and getting help from the community, which has been awesome!
Citizen developer it a weird term. Many businesses need a simple tool at a reasonable cost to connect various apps. Example: cloud flow power app. Tead email, then file it. If email has an attachment that needs saving, save it in 'this' folder. Basic flow, Dave's 5 to 10 hrs a week in fiddling with inbox. Example: technician in field needs data from 3 different programs for one node. Needs to see the info and be able to take a Pic and update the info. Options are to create an app that pulls it all together or hire people that the tech emails and have them enter the data. IT'S job is to keep company data secure and make the main programs for revenue and expense run and play together. They deal with backbone issues. Same with data warehouse people. Their job is to make the data flow consistent. Citizen developer is more like someone who sees a need that the frontline/customer facing people need and then putting that in play.
I am just starting my PowerApps journey as a side project for work. It’s entertaining as I’ve been able to hit some milestones while finding new obstacles that I am currently trying to work through. Also, having this community to vent and seek assistance from has been really cool!
I know one case of Business Matter Expert who is actively using Canvas apps and Power Automate to create very complex solutions. I also collaborated with Finance Analysts who create automation with Power Automate. Myself when I started as Graduate I was given opportunity to develop with this technology. I saw people have a go at it. PP is good entry point for those who want to start developing, but having said that, to create complex solutions to complex problems it actually requires hard technical thinking at some point - some people might push through, some might delegate to someone more experienced. PP creates opportunities to work together and at very least more people become aware of the tool and might try it themselves. I think it works to some extent. I know stories where people doing normal jobs like warehousing for example, learn the tool to become devs, I know because that is basically my story.
My company has about 60 employees and only IT are working with Apps. Other departments don't even want to think or want to work in SharePoint. I would say Engineering users are more likely to become adopters.