In my previous article I was talking about risk mitigation and introduced the Maker Assessment app that is part of the CoE Starter Kit publicly available through GitHub. This application can be fully customized and consists of a user part and an admin part that are both canvas apps. The solution package also can be installed with Dataverse for Teams, so every Maker should be able to use it by an assigned Microsoft 365 license with Power Apps enabled – of course depending on what kind of customizations you might add to it.
Today, I´d like to share more around user experiences for both apps, but before going into this, I´d like to point out what risk mitigation shouldn´t be – A blocking, 10 pages and more, overengineered process, that shuts down any innovation business users are looking for. I am using an example that I use quite often during my talks & workshops.
What would have been, if Leonardo da Vinci or The Beatles needed to deal with risk mitigation in place that was implemented the wrong way?
A challenger
Let´s assume he would have been forced not to use a canvas, paint or pen & paper? Would we´ve still seen his great inventions that are still in use today like the ball bearing? Imagine mechanics without ball bearing. Ball bearings can be found in nearly any machine that has rotary motion.
Another – completely different example – I am using is about the chord variations Sir Paul McCartney and John Lennon from The Beatles used in songwriting partnership.
What would have been, if someone would have forced them to avoid any variation, instead go with the well known chord progressions of those period of time. Would they´ve sounded any special and created one of the most iconic chords to ever be strummed from the moment it was played?
A Musician
When implementing a risk mitigation for your citizen development inside your company and re-use apps like the Maker Assessment app, keep the processes behind it simple. Ensure, Makers can onboard easily, feel empowered and part of a community. Ensure sponsorship of innovative ideas. Create a place of imagination. Below you could find the questionnaire that a Maker is walked through in 5 easy steps.
Depending on what the Maker selects or provides as an answer, to the right hand side there´s an info panel that offers immediate tips. You may ask how to adopt this concept, but make it work for your company? Those questions can be customized using the Maker Assessment Admin App.
This app allows your Center of Excellence Team to adjust the questions, answers and add possible additional information, such as important things to keep in mind or governance considerations.
As you can see from above visual, the Admin app allows to select any of the 5 out of the box available categories and provide additional questions or modify existing questions. Inside the Answers sections you can click on the + to add new answers or click on the pen icon to edit an existing answer. This shows the dialog above where you could use toggle controls to indicate some important constraints and provide additional governance information. This can be saved in Dataverse or Dataverse for Teams by a click on the Save button. But what about, if your governance process has different categories or additional one´s?
A click on the menu icon is here to rescue. It allows you to switch screen to edit categories, rename them, resort or even create a new category. In my day to day use, I found it quite simple to be used in terms of customizing the Maker Assessment app that is used by any Maker.
As outlined the Makers are guided through each category and would provide their answers. What I found difficult is the user to click on each category to move next or previous in between the categories – though a color indicator helps outlining where you are. But as said, I was under the assumption to click no submit. Though this button should be used only one time – when you´ve finished.
The Submit button navigates you to a results page that shows you the assessment results. You can Start Over again, by clicking on this button, Contact the Center of Excellence Team, which provides a small interface to generate an email, click on See details to seen an even more granular report around your assessment.
Above visual shows you this report. What I´ve recognized being valuable would be a print option – at least for a print out as PDF file. But as said, that is something you can easily customize and add to this solution. The Start building button from previous visual will walk you into the default environment where you could start building your app. In practice, you might want to add starting an approval from here, when the assessment report resulted in something that needs an approval – like a special environment setup or a DLP policy.
But, that´s up to you and your individual customization. The component is offering you a good starting point for this. Until then, …
