Professional vs. Citizen Development

What is Citizen Development

Citizen Development is an emerging approach on how to create new applications. Low-Code, No-Code platforms allow to create apps and automation even without the knowledge of specific programming languages. This allows broad audiences, including previously unexpected ones - such as marketers, sales professionals or even field technicians - to create apps, supporting their main area of business.

When to choose Citizen Development

If you seek to scale the ability of the company to remove unnecessary or unproductive work for individuals or small groups, and you want to empower users across the company, Citizen Development is right for you. In order to make it work in the long-run, you should install proper governance, security and lifecycle frameworks to ensure you keep business continuity, that will start relying of applications, built in a decentralized fashion.  

What is Professional Development

Professional development relies on a team of professionals - either inhouse or externals - to create an app on behalf of the company. Professional development on Microsoft Power Platform allows for radically shorted delivery cycle times on building dedicated business apps. Professional development retains key aspects like ALM (Application Lifecycle Management), greater possibilities of customizations as well as proper team cooperation on building an app. This allows for more sophisticated apps to be created.

When to choose Professional Development

If you seek to enable rapid development on complex business applications, Professional Development is the right choice. It brings classic development practices and ready-made components and integrations from Power Platform together. This allows to significantly shorten the delivery times  -even by an order of magnitude. It also leverages experience of the delivery team in properly designing algorithms (especially important in Power Automate flows) and enables customizations of behavior and look and feel.

Can the approaches be combined?

Yes! Microsoft Power Platform is an application ecosystem, where Citizen and Professional development can co-exist.