Teach people to fish and you feed them for a lifetime. Give people the power to customize their own rod, reel, tackle, and bait, and you provide them with the flexibility and agility to quickly react to changes and scale their fishing endeavors without limits.
Managers know the tools they use in their day-to-day work have an immense impact on their teams’ output. However, the off-the-shelf tools they choose dictate their processes and force them to work within (or around) the available capabilities and visibility.
Every company, department, and team has its own way of working but doesn’t necessarily have the capacity or skills to develop its own unique solutions. This creates a substantial gap between those who build or customize enterprise software and those who actually use it to run projects and processes.
The need to customize your customer relationship management (CRM), project management office (PMO), enterprise resource planning (ERP), or other tools or platforms to fit your team’s needs is often accompanied by a long process of submitting a request to an information technology (IT) queue, waiting for development, and undergoing multiple rounds of changes before it’s up and running.
The rigidness of your work tools might leave you wondering: Is your software working for you—or are you working for your software?
No-Code and Low-Code Applications
Fortunately, achieving the flexibility and agility you need to succeed in a rapidly evolving work environment is no longer entirely up to developers and your IT department.
The difference is the advance of “no-code” and “low-code” software, which requires minimal or no coding expertise, empowering users to become their own “citizen developers” who can create and customize the high-fidelity applications they need.
No-code capabilities allow anyone, no matter the extent of their technical skills, to customize the tools they work with to fit their exact needs with the help of simple point-and-click, drag-and-drop, building-block-like configuration.
Low-code software can be fully customized with minimal programming, usually within an application programming interface (API) and predefined framework, saving your organization time and money on the development side and freeing up your coding talent to focus on bigger, more impactful projects for your business. By 2024, low-code application development will account for more than 65% of all app-development activity, according to Gartner.
How a Work OS Can Work for You
Low-code and no-code capabilities open up more opportunities for you and your team to move faster, react more flexibly, and become more innovative than ever.
With its open API, low-code apps framework, and intuitive, no-code building blocks, monday.com’s flexible Work OS (operating system) has helped teams and organizations create applications for an unlimited number of use cases that only they would have the awareness or capacity to address.
Entrepreneur, a premier print and online media source, struggled to find the perfect CRM for its business. “I’ve worked at multiple publishers, and everywhere I’d go, we were always limited to tracking our sales campaigns by month,” says Deepah Shaw, Entrepreneur’s SVP of innovation. “At Entrepreneur, we also want to be able to track campaigns by salesperson, by agency, by brand.”
The team needed a CRM that would track their sales pipeline with by-year, by-month, by-salesperson, and by-territory views. Most CRMs included some of these capabilities but not all, and did not allow customization, making their processes cumbersome and time-consuming.
After using no-code building blocks to easily build its own workflow apps to streamline its sales pipeline, Entrepreneur increased its overall digital sales by 23%.
Following the Covid-19 crisis, the government of Alachua County, Florida, was charged with managing the allocation of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act funding to residents, businesses, and municipalities.
With the incredible time crunch, monday.com’s API allowed the team at Alachua County to develop its own low-code app on top of monday.com within 10 days. The team built a powerful back-office application with that allowed for streamlined auditing, screening and reporting, as well as a simple and user-friendly application process and status visibility board for applicants.
3 Things to Consider Before You Start
While at this point running your work with no-code and low-code software might seem like a no-brainer, there are a few things to take into account before taking that step with your team:
1. Balance. When finding and deploying a no-code/low-code solution within your organization, balance is key. While you don’t want a rigid tool, you also don’t want a blank slate that requires you to build from scratch.
2. Accessibility. Consider both the technical and nontechnical business units within your organization and the interface you need to connect them. You want the flexibility to customize and build on top of an effective platform with robust features: simple, but not simplistic; easy-to-use and intuitive while capable of facilitating highly complex workflows.
3. Onboarding. And lastly, any change in work management software must be as seamless as possible. Changing work software is often compared to changing an airplane engine mid-flight. Ensure an easy self-serve onboarding and the ability to integrate with your existing tools and data sources.
By giving your team the power to build their own work solutions, you unleash unlimited potential to learn, advance, grow—and catch even bigger, better fish.
Learn more about how monday.com Work OS can help you build the perfect workflows for your team.