Capabilities of Mendix
In the start stage, you’re looking to prove the speed and capabilities of Mendix while at the same time setting the foundation, which you’ll build upon as you mature through your adoption. You’ve adopted the platform as a way to disrupt the way you build technology today. And you need to prove that value to the rest of the organization. In this section, we’ll take a look at the attributes of the four Ps, people, process, portfolio, and platform. And identify which ones are most important to make sure that you get off on the right foot. For people really, the most important piece is making sure that you identify that first team, this first team should be co-located or in this environment at least times on-located. So they’re working on the same schedule. They should be resourced and planned and ensured that they’re dedicated to building Mendix applications. One of the biggest challenges we see is resources… is organizations provide resources that are partially enabled, focusing on two things at the same time, one being Mendix and another being potentially traditional development. This slows the growth and slows the adoption curve because it reduces the ability to understand how to build applications and distracts from the focus that’s needed.
From there, once you’ve identified that team, you’ll wanna make sure that rapid certified and trained. This should happen as close to kickoff, ideally the week before. So they can come out of that training and take advantage of that new knowledge directly into the application that they’re going to build. You’ll also wanna make sure you’ve got a dedicated product owner who really understands agile. In this environment, it’s usually underestimated how much time a product owner is going to need to spend with the development team. So make sure you’ve got somebody who’s as dedicated as possible and truly understands what the business needs and what the resource requirements are on a product owner in an agile project.
And finally, you’ll wanna look at what the first application is in determining whether or not an architect is important to a layout and map out integrations or UX UI, to make sure that there’s a consistent approach to design that you have with other applications within your ecosystem. It’ll also be a good opportunity to at least get them familiar, so as you grow and build more applications, the architects in the UX UI team are aware of what it’s like to do their work in Mendix. Now, when we talk about portfolio and to start state, we’re really focused on that first app. We wanna make sure that we identify an app that can go live quickly within 60 days and start to be used by the business. That application should have a relatively low amount of complexity so that it reduces the amount of exposure risks the development team has as they come up to speed in a new way of building applications.
We also wanna find an application that has a high business value and can be documented easily so that we can track the success towards the original assessment that we had. And finally, as we’re up and running and probably into our first sprint, we’ll want to start thinking about what that second application is so that once the team has finished developing, they can move right on to that next tool. As mentioned at the outset process is just as important as the platform, when it comes to speed of development, you’ll want to make sure you’ve got business and IT team members who are advocates for the agile methodology. These resources should understand how agile works and know how to apply it in their development process. And also while agile is a methodology, it provides best practices. There are nuances that you’ll need to think about how to apply it in your business.
Things like, “Will you wanna do a one week sprint or a two-week sprint when deciding storyboard points, do you want to use a Fibonacci method or do you want to do planning poker?” These are all nuances that you’ll have to take into account and think about how to best work within your organization. Start is an opportunity to test those processes and make sure they’re ready for the expansion as you grow into more applications and more teams. Also built into agile or constant feedback loops within the ceremonies. You’ve got your retrospectives and your user demos, but make sure you’re encouraging constant feedback by using sprint… By using agile with Mendix, you’re actually accelerating your development capabilities. So you wanna make sure that you’re providing a constant feedback loop so that both business and IT are aligned on the common goals.
And finally, earlier than later, you’ll want to think about how are you going to approach testing and deployment of the application. Application go-live will come quickly. 60 days is really a very short time when it comes to developing application. So you wanna make sure that’s ready to go and not slowing down the process once the development is complete. In the start, stage platform is very much focused on Mendix studio pro. You’ll want to make sure that your developers have signed up with an account and downloaded studio pro. So they’re ready for training in that first application. From there, your architect should review the applications requirements and ensure that any integrations are accounted for and the strategy is put in place. Next, you wanna think of what your cloud strategy and your deployment strategies are. If you’re declining demand is cloud, it’s as simple as a one-click deployment up into our environment. However, Mendix applications being multi-cloud, you can also deploy to Azure, AWS, or on-prem, and you should look to align with your organization’s policies on deploying to those environments.
Finally, you’ll wanna make sure you’ve got your dev, your test, and your production environments provisioned. This will ensure sooner than later, that application is ready to go, and when it is ready to go, the environments are ready. Again, if you’re deploying to Mendix cloud navigate to support that mendix.com and put in a request for the new notes. Once those are deployed, you’re ready to go, and you can start building your first application. At this point, you should not be ready to start building your first application. We’ve discussed what it takes to have your first team up and running. And how do identify that first application? We’ve also talked about the platform capabilities that need to be set in place and how the process should be structured so that you can ensure you’re getting the most out of Mendix. Thank you for taking the time. And if you want any more, if you have any more questions or need any more advice, please feel free to reach out to me at my email address below. Thank you.