The Business Agility Blog

Alexander Willemsen of Capegroup! Alexander is one of those users every company wishes for. He has been a very passionate member of the Mendix Community from the beginning and helped with solving more than 108 questions regarding Mendix. Needles to say these are the people who know Mendix in & out. His feedback helped improving the platform in a significant way and therefore we are happy to hand over him the award accompanied with a good bottle of champagne!

The reinsurance business involves extremely complex, logic-driven processes that are facilitated mainly by software applications. These applications provide an opportunity for reinsurance companies to differentiate themselves. Nothing is more frustrating than missing great business opportunities because IT departments can’t respond fast enough, or existing systems are too difficult to modify.

Adding an agile layer on top of these rigid systems offers COOs and CIOs at reinsurance companies the opportunity to react quickly without employing large teams of developers. We call this layer a “change layer” because it enables rapid changes that offer immediate business value on top of an otherwise inflexible core system.

Inefficient manual process? Automate it. Disparate systems slowing you down? Connect them. Underwriters doing arduous tasks? It’s called a microflow; and it’s a logic-based process flow. Have a novel idea that will win more business, but no IT horsepower to implement it? That’s what your change layer is for. It allows you to build even the most complex applications 10x faster, with minimal input from IT.

Most of these applications are custom portals, and while you might think those two words equate to a whole lot of time and money, your change layer gives you the ability to ensure a rapid and significant ROI. The key here is that you don’t need to employ an army of developers to implement a new portal.

Most of the work can be done by business people, and in our opinion, it should be. They are the ones who know the problem and are likely to have an idea for a solution. We worked with Arch Re to help them get into the Program business by building a custom application that provides a more efficient mechanism for clients to report the risks subject to the contract. Click here to read the case study.

We’ve been advocating the Mendix feedback mechanism heavily ever since the release of Mendix 3.0 in 2011. We knew it was the missing link between people using apps and people making apps. You probably know what it is and how easily it aligns your apps with the ever changing needs of business people, but so far the Mendix feedback loop has only been available to those of us with both a Sprintr account and an app running in the Mendix Cloud. With the latest update of Sprintr, you can implement the Feedback Widget into your company´s website as well to find out directly from visitors what they think of your site.

Here’s what to do to fix the glitches in your site within five minutes:

1. Get a sprintr account if you haven’t already
2. Paste a little code snippet in your head tag (like you -or your webmaster- did for Google Analytics)
3. Put the ID of a specific ‘website’ sprintr project into the code
4. Tweak the code: You can tweak the code to enable attachments, detect usernames and many more options to collect the tightest metadata possible

I’ll bet the minute you start using the widget you will get suggestions for improvements you could never think about for yourself. We use it for Mendix.com as well and within days we had great input…

• “Where can I find the Mendix Whitepaper” (so we made it very apparent on the product page now)
• “Your email states the event is on date X, while the site states the event is on date Y.”
• “Just finished watching the video on SAP integration, do you have one like that for Microsoft Dynamics?”

The feedback widget makes Sprintr different than any other project management tool out there. For the first time, you and your end users can collaborate in real time through your website or application.

Any business analyst who’s dealt with requirements changing late in the game will appreciate the transparency that we have built into our free agile collaboration tool, Sprintr. There are no “silver bullets” out there for common BA issues, but Sprintr addresses problems like business-IT miscommunication, inefficiency, lack of visibility or involvement. Anticipating these issues in order to complete projects on time is one way to make you stand out and reach rock star status. For those who have already turned the tide on changing the way they complete projects, here are a few reasons why Sprintr and the role of the business analyst can get along so well:

1. Everyone Knows Everything

This might scare some of you, but having watched a few projects go awry when certain stakeholders are privy to specific requirements, I can’t emphasize the value of transparency enough. When user stories are submitted, every project member has the opportunity to comment on or modify them, and everyone is aware of changing requirements.

2. Sequence By Priority

There’s no need to lecture you about the cold hard value of scrum – the development methodology that Sprintr supports – but by laying out your user stories (requirements) in priority order and time boxing them into deliverable releases, you can rest assure that the requirements with the highest ROI will be delivered first. In Sprintr, you can even drag and drop user stories into priority order to keep your backlog in check.

3. Immediate Feedback Loops

Sprintr has a great feedback mechanism. You just put a simple widget in your application or website, and end users or testers can submit ideas, issues, or questions from within the application. All you need to do is go through these tickets and turn the appropriate ones into new user stories. Suddenly you have a feedback cycle that enhances requirement management wrapped up in a spiffy little web app.

4. Cloud Connected Scrum

Distributed project teams deal with a host of issues that keep business analysts from achieving their goals. You have multiple time zones, people with different technical backgrounds and work ethics, all of which amplify the miscommunication and inefficiency that typically accompany a complex software project. Sprintr alleviates these issues by centralizing all communication and project management processes in a cloud application.

5. Social Activity Streams

Sprintr is like Facebook, except more productive. The sales guy who coined this declaration was referring to the social facets of Sprintr – the Company Wall, the Project Wall, the daily updates, and the comment threads. These components make Sprintr a collaboration space without any physical limitations – no product owner calls, no whiteboards, and no scheduled meeting times.

As you can see, business analysts truly have the most to gain from Sprintr. Sure, developers can plan out sprints and milestones, and business users can submit user stories and feedback – but you’re the one who gets to sit back and watch the magic happen. You are no longer “over-documenting” requirements ahead of time, hoping that IT has received the input clearly and will provide the output as requested. You have a tool to manage this heavily-trafficked intersection, and virtually guarantee that projects are completed on time and within budget.

For those of you interested in learning more, watch this webinar to learn how Mendix and Sprintr eliminate the risk of project failure.

Last week, research done by Multiscope (read the article [in Dutch] here and here), revealed that the number one agony for employees is poorly functioning software. Agony caused by either poor performance, poor user interface or limited functionality (likely caused by faulty business-IT collaboration). Now, I could start blogging a mantra about why agile development is the way to fix this massive glitch (for more on this visit the Mendix Essentials or take a look at one of our success stories), but let’s start with a very simple solution that will take less organizational measures than a full agile adoption (if you haven’t done that already!)

First let’s see the top 5 of agonies for employees:

• Poor software (either poor performing, GUI or functionality)
• Elbowing colleagues to get on top
• Bad ambiance at the office
• Colleagues who always come in late
• Loud people in the office.

It’s bizarre to see that the number one agony is the one that can be resolved in the most tangible way: just by listening. Instead of having to take management measures or expensive H&R campaigns to change people’s behavior. All that is needed is a simple solution to give the end user a voice; to engage them in actively improving the tools they need to succeed in their day to day work. This simple solution for your organization materializes in a button that comes with Sprintr: The Feedback Button.

I’ll bet the minute you start collecting feedback and the first bugs or design issues have been resolved, your end users feel they have a voice and are in control. Perhaps the ROI of all the fixes is so big your company can actually start those expensive H&R campaign to nail the other agonies as well.

This is the season for added stress and holiday cheer. With this time of year comes a need to make sure that all of your holiday parties are planned and scheduled. For my family, it means it’s time to have our extended family party where everyone brings food, some people bring arts and crafts for the smaller children, and some bring gifts for our annual “Yankee Swap” gift exchange.

Somewhere just after Thanksgiving everyone in my family receives a kind reminder from my aunt asking us to fill out her wonderful Excel spreadsheet decorated with colored columns with our names and what we plan on bringing. Sure enough every year my wife and I fill the spreadsheet out with something only to have it returned to us saying, “Your cousin has already signed up for bringing this.” or “We don’t need that this year.”, now this is all well and good but it got me to thinking. I work with an application development platform every day that I know I am going to explain the wonders of to one of these people at this party. Wouldn’t it be a lot easier for my poor aunt to have a web application?

So with a few clicks of the mouse I was off, I made a data model that included all of two entities (person and item), I made an association so that a person could belong to multiple items, and then I made three forms. About fifteen minutes later I had myself a nice little application, I then stole the styling package from an existing application and threw it into my project folder. My next step was Microsoft Word where I made this little gem:

I then went into the style and changed my customer’s logo to this image and I was ready! With five more clicks I had my application in the cloud. I’ve since added some Excel import functionality (I’d hate to see my aunt’s hard work go to waste) and Google maps so everyone knows how to get to the party. All in all in under an hour I eliminated many hours of effort for my aunt. Plus now I have a basis to tell everyone what I do. Now I just need to figure out how to explain to people that it’s not just Christmas party planning applications that I build…

Mendix 3.1 has been released today. Quite a few improvements have been made since the release of Mendix 3.0: 8 new features, 17 improvements and 59 small fixes. We advocate user feedback strongly within Agile Application Lifecycle Management, therefore virtually all improvements are based upon  feedback from users, and so we thank you for helping us improve our technology!

One of the more notable benefits of Mendix 3.1 is that merging has been made more intuitive and powerful. You can now see which revisions have been merged before, and revert deleted documents, folders and modules, allowing seamless collaboration within a project team.

Another big step forward with Mendix 3.1 is error messaging and sanity checks. We now allow you (and us) to diagnose problems earlier and more specifically, making user feedback even more actionable for development teams. We are fully aware that the dialogue between an end user and a project team should be as flawless as possible.

Also important to note is that version numbering has changed and 3.1.0 is a minor release. You can read our tech-tip blog post to learn how we number our versions from now on.

There is a lot more included in this release. Check out the release notes in the Support Portal for a complete overview.

Yesterday Atos CEO Thierry Breton announced he will ban all internal email from the work floor within 18 months by stating: “It is not normal that some of our fellow employees spend hours in the evening dealing with their emails. Email is no longer the appropriate communication tool.”

Not to toot my own horn (well maybe just a bit) but at Mendix we have been collaborating, communicating for a long time now using Sprintr. We’ve already noticed many benefits upon adopting the solution, which enables better conversation but also enhances our day to day work life.

Sprintr is of course two things: a) a feedback mechanism aligning what the business truly wants with what developers think the business wants and b) an enterprise collaboration tool with activity streams (company and project wall’s) and agile project management features.

Let’s zoom in on the day to day benefits of using Sprintr for enterprises like Atos. Here are three improvements that happened when Sprintr was introduced to our various global offices:

1. Mr Breton is right! No more overloaded inbox! Incoming mail has been reduced immensely. No more sales people mailing their wins all the time and receiving 50 congratulations messages afterwards, just one post (and lots of comments and ‘likes’) on Sprintr. No more endless back and forth emailing about the next Mendix company outing and being CC-ed with suggestions (ranging from go-karting to base-jumping), one poll on sprintr and we were done deciding.
2. Finding documents: No more need to call my CEO (CEO’s seem to be quite busy) 15 times to ask if he will send me the slides of his last talk at the Mendix Essentials. Or where was that campaign planning my manager send me last month? Have I mentioned how convenient it is to have everything in a cloud called Sprintr?
3. Increase synergy: You don’t email the whole company when you are working on a super-cool Proof of Concept, but people have been posting these activities on Sprintr, resulting in colleagues sharing their building blocks, themes and widgets. By posting simple status updates people become more aware of each others activities and offer a helping hand.

Recap of the Mendix Essentials held at the Euromast in Rotterdam last week where Arno Rood introduced Mendix and spoke about the urgency to be agile, where Floor van Gageldonk and Ramses Schenk developed a simple app together with the audience, where Floor broke down a customer case with Eurofiber and where the audience had the opportunity to ask everything on their mind.

Managing Director of Benelux Arno Rood Introducing Mendix (in Dutch):

Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions about Mendix:

Questions by the audience:

Please make an appointment with our Sales Team if you have in depth questions about Mendix:

Mendix Essentials review

As our seats for the Mendix Essentials tend to run out fast, make sure to sign up quickly for the next edition on january 27.