This guide teaches you how to take a more nuanced approach to mitigate and manage delivery risk at critical junctures.
Skills Checklist:
Some degree of risk is always inevitable when managing cross-platform development teams or a large-scale deployment. This is especially true as business partners seek to innovate and develop new digital differentiators in a dynamic marketplace. As organizations increase velocity to keep up with new demands, teams traditionally charged with mitigating risk struggle to keep pace. As a result, many are now taking a significantly more nuanced approach to mitigate and manage delivery risk at critical junctures. This new approach can effectively match the risk appetite (or risk tolerance) of a given organization to an appropriate level of resource investment without slowing development teams.
Application delivery requires different types of governance attention across the application development lifecycle. Appian has condensed this lifecycle into four phases (The Appian Delivery Methodology) and mapped a series of mandatory, lightweight readiness checks and application reviews to each phase. These readiness checks and application reviews ensure that best practice and program standards are implemented across the critical Build and Release phases.
While this model can be implemented with slight variations based on organizational requirements and risk appetite, Appian strongly encourages the involvement of the following three roles in order to implement effective governance:
Implementing a peer review process ahead of more formal Application Reviews or other internal governance checkpoints is a useful way to ensure your developers are following intended practices. Whether it’s for code or database development, Appian customers using this practice report this being a ‘great way to scale valuable governance resources’ and that ‘informal peer-to-peer reviews has accelerated development of younger team members’. Peer reviews also work exceptionally well in federated governance models or in organizations that cannot dedicate full-time resources to a CoE.
The Application Delivery Governance Model enables customers with a lightweight, effective way to govern their Appian delivery teams. By implementing this model, Appian program owners can ensure that applications are 1) built according to best practices and 2) adhere to program-specific requirements and standards. Designed by Appian’s Customer Success Professionals, this model provides delivery teams with the standards, measurements and process alignment needed to develop quality low-code applications, quickly and efficiently.
While this model can be implemented with slight variations based on organizational requirements and risk appetite, Appian strongly encourages the involvement of at minimum the following three roles in order to implement effective governance.
The Program Owner wears a few different hats, but is ultimately the individual responsible for making sure the governance model is followed. They are the ultimate approval authority for governance standards, ensuring that project managers enforce standards, and making the “go forward” decisions at readiness checks. They also provide delivery teams with contextual information and awareness of the program’s direction.
The Program Architect’s primary concern is executing the governance program through a series of lightweight reviews and readiness checks. They will ensure the high quality of your application.
TTo get the most value out of your Program Architect, Appian encourages this role to be a part of the planning efforts early in the project lifecycle. The visibility will not only help prepare them for readiness checks throughout, but their domain expertise will also help navigate unforeseen obstacles in planning sessions.
Team Leads are the day-to-day coordinator for application development ceremonies and serve as the main point of contact for delivery teams. They ensure their teams follow governance guidelines and standards set by the Program Owner and facilitate discussions between teams where needed. They also attend all readiness checks and reviews for their teams.
During each phase of the application development lifecycle, delivery teams engage in select reviews where their progress will be checked by an expert against outlined best practices and program-standards. These reviews are designed to be lightweight and favor discussion over documentation; although some reviews do require artifacts for facilitation.
Application reviews will result in a prioritized list of recommended next steps categorized by risk profile (High, Medium, Low). If there are findings in the “High” category, the team should address the recommendation and perform the review again. Teams should still address “Medium” and “Low” findings, but these should be done in parallel as development continues.
Goal: Mitigate architectural risk early in the process by modeling and reviewing foundational design decisions.
What to bring: Completed Appian Architecture Document
When to review: End of Initiate Phase
Attendees: Team Lead, Project Manager, Program Architect
Goal: Ensure the developed features are designed according to standards.
What to bring: Demonstration of completed features
When to review: As needed. Recommended at least a few times every iteration
Attendees: Team Lead, Key Developers, Program Architect
Goal: Ensure interfaces are intuitive, adhere to best practices, and are consistent across the platform.
What to bring: Mockups or demonstration of developed UX
When to review: During Initiate Phase or during sprint 1 and again before the end of the Build Phase
After a team is ready to advance the next phase of development, delivery teams engage in readiness checks. Here, program management will review the current status of all findings and determine whether the team is ready to advance to the next lifecycle phase. If a team is not deemed ready to proceed, Program Owners will provide teams with the steps needed to advance to the next phase. Delivery teams will continue this process until the application has been released.
Goal: Ensure developed features adhere to development standards via the Health Check tool.
What to bring: Health Check results from the development environment
When to review: Every iteration
Attendees: Team Lead, Program Architect
Goal: Ensure the application is technically ready to release. Though the delivery team will have created a release-able application throughout the Build phase, this is an opportunity for a final check.
What to bring: Deployment Plan, Defect Log
When to review: During the Release Phase
Attendees: Team Lead, Key Developers