The Low-Code Value
Tags: powerplatform
Published: 2020-10-25 02:01:48

The biggest challenge today to anyone interested in Low-Code and Power Platform is to really be able to pitch this internally and I have come up with the following financial analog to the situation to actually promote more investments for all.
From a technical perspective Low-Code is great and awesome but what about internally how can we pitch and work this out? How can I tell my management and that's worth investing in Low-Code and continue to invest in it as it grows. 
The key is points:
1. Productivity
2. Cost reduction
3. Re-use
4. Anyone becomes a developer

##Productivity
Just saying is productive is not enough we have to prove this out everyday, but this other day now I heard about how fast I deployed a solution and it was a nice comparison: 5 hours against 5 months, but that didn't tell the full story because we have to take other things into account which is the following it was not only one developer developing this application which was a chatbot so I did a Power Virtual Agent in a couple of hours and the guys worked for 5 months and didn't get it as good as I did it still in 5 hours. This is huge and it's a straight forward comparison of 2 developers, 1 project manager and 1 architect against 1 low-code developer. In this specific case I'm just being nice put yes if we put everything in the calculator it will certainly be over 5x but if we think about Power Automate and everything else we can make it stable in the 5x range easy.

Another thing we have to take into account in terms of speed is the ability to publish right away any change, this is crucial for many businesses areas and cases and this speed is there in the Low-Code, on regular coding platforms you have to push to github then export or run an action then get a deployment window and deploy it. It will never be as fast as clicking on publish button.

##Cost Reduction
One person developing is a lot of times a lot cheaper than having a group of developers developing a solution for your business case, putting into account that you'll have infrastructure for SQL DB and everything else a lot of times it's no expensive to have connectivity to the DBs or WSs if you need to, how much will you save in terms of development work? Not to have to manage another project, another contract, provision new infrastructure. This needs to go into the calculator. Using SaaS has huge benefits and they need to be accountable for, structuring accordingly to your business to provide maximum business value with reduced costs is the optimal goal in the end.

##Re-use
In O365 we're always re-using the same infrastructure, the same environment we're not always provisioning something new this means that we need to make sure to always make this part of the calculation that if we're always re-using and making good use of it, we're getting ROI and we're getting value from it. We're benefiting from this strategy from beginning to end. End-to-End benefits. For a new project, provisioning new hardware what's going to be the TCO for this in long-term versus the SaaS? Low-Code is always the cheapest strategy and choice, no matter how you put it in the equation the re-usage is a huge part of this equation.

##Anyone becomes a developer
Think about the business areas that anyone can become a developer for their business processes that means that you don't have to hire new developers this means you're leveraging the Citizen-Developers within your organization, getting the person who defines the process to actually create the process themselves and you're not hiring new developers at the same time leveraging cheaper working/hours on labor costs. 
It becomes a win that you don't have to hire new developers, you can develop the talents internally within your organization.
You can have a chain in your organization where Developers create components for your "Citizen Developers" and then you can have the "Citizen Developers" spending less time because they have better building blocks to work on within the O365 eco-system. You can have developers doing what developers need to do and the Citizen Developers becoming more productive everyday on a combined chain.
There will still exist cases that are more complex and will need IT to develop for them but we can have the majority of the cases being handled by the "Citizen Developers" certainly.

##Thanks
Thank you for reading this article if you feel something is missing please let me know.