The Low-Coding Portfolio Workshop

For modern organizations, it’s essential to develop powerful applications quickly and when necessary. This need will only increase in the future due to the lack of traditional IT capacity.

Mendix low-coding bridges the gap between business and IT and makes application development rapid. Organizations, business units, and departments that adopt Mendix, usually don't aim to create only a single app. They plan to implement a full application portfolio over time, inside the framework of an App Factory. 

Why portfolio planning?

An application portfolio lists applications that are a fit for Mendix and will deliver future value that supports the business case for Mendix low-code adoption. Focusing on a long-term portfolio implementation strategy helps to:

• build low-coding, UX/UI, and architecture skills that complement the complexity of the growing portfolio
• plan application go-live alongside changing business needs and capabilities
• plan and visualize value return (and therefore the visibility of success of the center)

If you are planning to adopt Mendix anytime soon, you should consider planning for a portfolio you want to implement. Here is how to do that.

How to do a portfolio workshop

Portfolio workshops don't need a lot of resources and are easy to execute.

Needed resources 

You can execute a workshop one on your own, but actually, portfolio workshops work better with small to medium groups. Make sure people that are attending want to drive Mendix adoption, have process insights for the organization, and are not afraid to shake processes up a bit. Gather everyone in a meeting room (can be online) and have a white- or a concept board ready. If you want to execute online you can online concept boards or a PowerPoint deck.

Brainstorm

Start with a brainstorming session on how you could impact and improve processes with digital applications. In general, it helps to look for applications that fall into one of the following groups.

Innovation apps

They change existing business models and integrate new technologies, like blockchain and artificial intelligence.

Customer engagement apps

They offer portals into existing applications for customers and businesses or create mobile capabilities.

Operational efficiency apps

These apps will often have a focus on department processes and will put workflows center stage.

Legacy migration apps

Will extend core or replace core systems. If you know a few processes running on paper, excel, or access you probably found your first app ideas. 

You will often notice that application ideas can be associated with a business capability, group, or expertise. If that happens, try to think about that area further to come up with additional ideas that maybe even interact with application ideas you already had.

Brainstorming usually results in a considerable list of application ideas in less than an hour. This is your unsorted portfolio. It might look like it if you can manage to sort it against processes and capabilities:

Now it's time to sort and prioritize your portfolio.

Sorting the portfolio

In the next step, you want to sort your portfolios applications by different application traits. This can be a science and an art the more traits you want to cover. Fortunately, for a first portfolio can be easily done by focusing on two traits: complexity and impact.

Complexity

The application complexity trait depicts how hard it is to implement an application. The more complex an app is, the more skills you will need that are not easily available when you start adopting Mendix at the moment. Try to assess application complexity in T-shirt sizes, Small, Medium and Large. Innovation and legacy migration apps (for complex legacy systems) will usually be complex. A large number of features for an app will increase app complexity, try to break these into different apps. Operational efficiency and applications that replace paper and excel processes are usually easier to pull off and fall into the small complexity group.

Impact

Anticipating the impact of apps at this step is important because you want to create apps that are noticed by the business around you. The impact can come in different shapes. Operational efficiency application impact can often be measured in work-hours saved. Other applications turn processes everyone hates to go through into a delight or will be accessed by a huge number of people in the organization. Don't underestimate applications that touch peoples emotions or basic needs, like the COVID-19 SafeWorkplaceApp or applications in which parents request parental leave. Try to estimate if an app will have Low, Middle or High impact. If you are having a hard time with this, sort all applications into an Impact queue.

Now, all you have to do is to place your application ideas into a portfolio matrix that uses complexity and impact as it's dimensions. This will result in something like this:

The portfolio matrix is an ideal starting point to discuss the portfolio with stakeholders and colleagues. It will also allow you to build a portfolio execution plan.

The portfolio execution plan

To turn your two-dimensional portfolio matrix into an execution plan you follow-up on look at the application ideas in the matrix and sort them in three faces: Start, Structure and Scale. 

Start Phase

Pick 1-3 applications that have low complexity and ideally a medium impact. This will allow you to avoid having a hard time with your first development projects because the technical expectations were set too high. A medium impact will lead to people flocking to your cause and management supporting you in what you are doing. (In the long run, it might also help your career by gaining visibility.) Try to avoid High impact applications as too much success, users and visibility can become hard to manage when you are just starting.

Structure Phase

Pick 3-5 applications for the structure phase. You can add a bit more complex ideas now and be more flexible with the created impact. While you build applications in the Start phase you can try to build up expertise that will help you deliver applications in the structure phase. Don't overdue you thinking here, the structure phase is still a couple of months away and you will certainly be able to refocus your portfolio plan before it starts. 

Scale Phase

Pick 5-10 applications for the scale phase. For now, you can use these to discuss where you want your portfolio and your value proposition to be in roughly a year.

That's it, you just executed a portfolio workshop! So...

What's next?

Start implementing your portfolio. Mendix enablement is available for free, as is the development environment and hosting environment on the public Mendix cloud. You can find everything necessary under www.mendix.com. 

Embrace when colleagues and stakeholders challenge your portfolio execution plan and integrate their views and ideas in the ideation and sorting of application ideas. Ideally, you plan for reoccurring reviews of the portfolio execution plan.