One of the most common questions we receive focuses on how to structure an organization for low-code success. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer to this question, but we do have a few guidelines for getting started. The most important part is thinking of your Appian-trained workforce as a team, with mutually supportive roles and responsibilities across the organization.
At Appian, we think a successful team is a combination of a few select roles that each play an important role in a project’s success:
Let’s dig a little bit deeper into each of these team roles, why they are important, and what they need to know.
For our purposes, leaders include business stakeholders, managers, or executives who need awareness of low-code automation capabilities but aren't heavily involved in the development process. They are, however, stakeholders and decision makers responsible for an organization’s success. They often control the budget, people, and determine the desired outcomes of projects. To be successful, these leaders need to understand the capabilities of Appian and how it can solve their problems.
Leaders also need to understand how to source, train, and structure their teams for ongoing success, and they’ll usually want to know what pitfalls to look out for when automating portions of their business.
See our Vision pillar for resources geared towards Appian Leaders.
The planner role defines the processes to be automated, prioritizes development efforts, and ensures coordination with other business units. The most common job titles we see functioning in the planner role include business analysts, product owners, project managers, scrum masters, and UX designers. Some organizations have distinct team members assigned to each role, while others may have a single individual functioning across multiple roles. At a minimum, you should plan to include both a product owner and an analyst as part of your Appian team. This will ensure your organization is positioned for success.
Appian planners need a strong understanding of the Appian delivery methodology and a basic understanding of how Appian objects come together to make applications. See our Delivery pillar for more resources geared towards Appian Planners.
Builders, or developers, are the core of any Appian delivery team. Their primary job is taking requirements produced by the analysts, prioritizing them with the product owner, and converting them into applications using the Appian low-code platform. Functionally, the role of an Appian builder can be broken down into the following positions:
Appian strongly recommends a Team of 3 structure for most projects, with larger projects or initiatives distributed across multiple teams. Each team should be cross-functional in so much as any member of the team can take on any task when needed. Naturally, some team members will be stronger in certain skills than others, but we’ve found that high-performing, multi-disciplinary teams are best suited for low-code success.
For example, a low-code developer often falls into the “Developer and…” paradigm. This means that a particular team member might fall into a dual role as a low-code developer, in addition to acting as an architect, scrum master, UX lead, or test manager. When building these small cross-functional teams, it’s important to look for team members that have skills outside of their primary role or function. Whether that’s an interest in data models, integrations, or process mining, looking out for complimentary skills is the best way to establish a versatile low-code team.
Administrators own responsibility for the Appian system and supporting infrastructure. This includes overseeing server admins, database administrators, IT staff, or anyone supporting the application’s backend. Administrators are most often concerned with the security implications of the Appian platform and how it interacts with their internal systems. This includes things such as data management, web APIs, user accounts and more.
Although administrators aren’t usually involved in development themselves, they work closely with lead developers to define technical requirements and boundaries. To this end, administrators should pursue a basic level of training to better understand the terminology and underlying infrastructure of the Appian platform.
Application Administrators are employees of the customer organization responsible for the maintenance and support of individual applications. They’re typically in charge of user management, performing basic clean-up and housekeeping activities, and serve as the first layer of support to triage tickets and issues.
At a high level, Application Administrators understand how Appian objects interact with one another to form an application, but aren’t developers themselves. They perform basic troubleshooting activities, and are knowledgeable on navigating Appian support systems to get resolution on more complicated issues. Application Admins are also familiar with tools including Health Check, Health Dashboard, and MyAppian.
To support this role, we developed the Appian Application Administrator course, available through Appian Academy.