Power Platform | Fusion of teams

In a recent Design Thinking workshop, I was taken aside in a break by a group of developers who joined the workshop to better understand the „low-code motion“ currently ongoing. A discussion started around the following slide which showed the „Citizen developer“ self-service approach and the „Low-code“ project approach to the right for more sophisticated projects managed by „superusers, partners or even pro developers“.

The challenger questions were no suprise to me, coming from the pro developer side and walking the pro-code way for many years customizing Microsoft CRM 3.0, later on Microsoft Dynamics CRM and finally xRM.

Change Management is sometimes tough to understand and if you build your comfort zone around something and somebody or something else is currently disrupting your business, you´re trying to end in defend mode first, while you should consider a growth mindset first.

Of course, as a pro developer you might argue that you can perform many things with professional coding with low effort as well and low-code isn´t needed for x, y, z. Well, let´s face it – it neither is the answer to everything. But if you take a look at the „Drivers“ from slide above, you might feel familiar with those.

The moment you start using a low-code toolset, you will need to learn a couple of things – same as you started your developer career. But you will notice that a couple of things will be taken care-of by the Power Platform itself. Compared to „coding“, where you would be asked for taking care of it. This learning- or „increased efficiency“ curve that I outline in above visual, shows what kind of potential you should think of, familiarizing yourself with Power Platform, its capabilities, services and features. Could you generate the same amount of efficiency with traditional ways of coding – of course, but it will take you time and might not scale out the same way as it is provided by this SaaS offering.

For instance, when it comes up to your app being in the need of a reliable datasource, that scales-out well, offers all kind of GDPR compliancy and should also being easy to maintain and managed – there´s no question the Microsoft Dataverse has some benefits compared with traditional SQL databases hosted on virtual machines in on-premises infrastructure. Again, could you offer all this on your own? Yes, but it will take time, effort and costs and might become a challenge these days offering room for improvements needed to quickly re-adjust your business based on foreign drivers.

I am not saying that Microsoft Dataverse is a „must“ in every low-code project, don´t get me wrong. Remember the discussion was coming from pro-developers asking around the (business) value of using low-code Power Platform as a development toolkit.

We closed-out the workshop with above visual, demonstrating the three layers every developer will be equipped with, when considering Power Platform as low-code development toolkit. While business users build a simple low-code application or using RPA or DPA for process automation, pro developers might find more time to discover new capabilities of „Mixed Reality“, building new core business applications to transform digitally.

„It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change“ – Charles Darwin

Until then – happy coding #ProCodeNoCodeUnite