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Insight for CIOs: Building a Great Mobile App Development Team


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Source: Kevin Doley


Mobile development is new enough in enterprises, that often application development teams are created on an ad hoc basis. That works fine for a while, but at some point -- if your business is going to get serious about creating mobile apps -- you need to thoughtfully assemble a strong team, and organize them in a way that helps them work effectively and efficiently.

How to do it? Adrian Leow, Nick Jones and Richard Marshall at Gartner offer plenty of help in their new report, “How to Build a Successful Mobile App Development Team.” The report lays out the issue this way:

“Organizations are typically lacking in basic app development life cycle skills such as user experience (UX) design, quality assurance, mobile-specific back-end data integration and mobile-oriented security needs. To reduce app development time, while maintaining app quality, a systematic full life cycle approach is needed to cover the mobile app life cycle stages of discovery, design, development and testing, deployment, and gathering and analyzing feedback.”

Taking the a Full Life-Cycle Approach

In Gartner’s view, everything flows from that life-cycle approach. Key to successful development, the report says, is establishing a Mobile Center of Excellence (MCOE). A Mobile Center of Excellence should be run by a leader who will typically be “a mobile visionary, a business architect or a line of business (LOB) manager.”

Once that is done, the leader should conduct a discovery process to gather ideas for apps, prioritize them, and create a roadmap for developing them. A team including LOB and IT representatives and domain experts should be part of that process.Gartner

Next, the app and user interface design phase starts. Gartner recommends combining this with the testing phase, and using an iterative design-and-development approach. The team to do all this should include the following:

    • User researcher
    • Interaction designer
    • Visual designer
    • Content strategist
    • Front-end developer
    • Experience lead
When that is done, the app should be developed using agile development practices, with a group composed of a product manager, a “scrum manager” who acts as a team coach and organizer, and the development team itself, which is in Gartner’s words, “a cohesive, self-organizing, cross-functional group that contains all the skills necessary to deliver on the project goals.” Next comes the deployment cycle, overseen by an expert with experience in either public app stores or private mechanisms for app deployment.

The app team shouldn’t consider its work done when apps are deployed, Gartner says. They need to use analytics to monitor app use, and then use that feedback to continually improve existing apps, and better design and build new ones.

Read why Gartner is recommending Rapid Mobile App Development (RMAD) platforms for these teams.

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About Author

Amy Groden-Morrison
Amy Groden-Morrison

Amy Groden-Morrison has served more than 15 years in marketing communications leadership roles at companies such as TIBCO Software, RSA Security and Ziff-Davis. Most recently she was responsible for developing marketing programs that helped achieve 30%+ annual growth rate for analytics products at a $1Bil, NASDAQ-listed business integration Software Company. Her past accomplishments include establishing the first co-branded technology program with CNN, launching an events company on the NYSE, rebranding a NASDAQ-listed company amid a crisis, and positioning and marketing a Boston-area startup for successful acquisition. Amy currently serves as a Healthbox Accelerator Program Mentor, Marketing Committee Lead for the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge Launch Smart Clinics, and on the organizing team for Boston TechJam. She holds an MBA from Northeastern University.

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The Alpha platform is the only unified mobile and web app development and deployment environment with distinct “no-code” and “low-code” components. Using the Alpha TransForm no-code product, business users and developers can take full advantage of all the capabilities of the smartphone to turn any form into a mobile app in minutes, and power users can add advanced app functionality with Alpha TransForm's built-in programming language. IT developers can use the Alpha Anywhere low-code environment to develop complex web or mobile business apps from scratch, integrate data with existing systems of record and workflows (including data collected via Alpha TransForm), and add additional security or authentication requirements to protect corporate data.

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