Framework for citizen development

Hi all,

I am trying to understand a bit the pro’s and con’s for having a separate Tenant for citizen developers that will run attended automations vs unattended robots in another Tenant. Here are some of the sub questions I have related to this:

  1. Would you recommend to separate the citizen developer automations from unattended automations by having a single Tenant for each (with its own orchestrator, data service, …). What is the advantage of dissociating this from other developments? What are possible limitations?
  2. The attended automations will need to abide by some rules (libraries, package feeds, product policies for Assitant, Studio X, …). Does this influence the decision whether to split up Tenants?
  3. Are there any other aspects that you would recommend to consider?

Thanks in advance!

I have noticed a common approach of having the studio X + attended license to be in a different folder, sometimes a different tenant but it depends in the requirements. If the group requires complete isolation then the tenant can be considered

logically they should be in a different folder as the citizen developer may alter some entities in the orchestrator mistakenly, which can affect other automation. There might be more confusing things for citizen dev, if the tenant is common

We have grouped the citizen developer license and attended license to a new folder once they shifted from attended to citizen dev + attended model to isolate their data from any other automation. that was also recommended by client and UiPath themselves that time

Surely this is a valid point to be considered, but again this can be managed via the folders.
Even though you split among Tenants → you can always have the feed sent to the host first and then inherit to respective tenants OR have complete isolation and have tenant-level feed

there are governance rules that plays an important role, but that depends on the infrastructure
you may have or not have same rules for the citizen and dev.

I have seen @kirankumar.mahanthi1 having some serious thoughts on the Citizen Developer Governance Plan, maybe he can comment few points that are commonly relevant.

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Hi @rahulsharma nice to see your answer on the citizen developer. Thanks for involving me in this. Hi @krisvandenbergh welcome back to forum.

  1. Yeah I agree @rahulsharma on the first point it is very hard to manage multiple tenants better we should go with folders. We can manage easily citizen developers users in the folders. and also citizen developer projects are not always attended most of them are going for un attended automations in this case you have to go for federated model to organize the folder in tenant.

  2. I agree with rahul on this point.

  3. For citizen developer program governance is the main key point for success and it is very critical since citizen developers are very new to the RPA and they are not aware of much on studiox and what it can do so there is lot of chance that they can do mistakes it can effect our critical applications or environment in our organization. You have to keep right policies for them and you have to impose those policies strictly to those users. there are two ways we can impose governance policies.

Example policies are like restricting the citizen developers to access critical applications and restrict citizen developers to create infinite loops in the work flow etc.

a) we can impose governance policies directly on the studiox of the citizen developers. By using work flow analyser we can impose policies and enforce them in the same place.

b) we can impose governance policies through orchestrator (Automation Op) this feature available on the cloud and also latest on prem orchestrators as a different automation suite.

Please refer the below links

feel free to ask if you have any more questions we are happy to help you. thanks.

Regards,
Kirankumar.

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Thanks a lot for your elaborate answer. For sure the citizen developer governance rules are different for the citizend developers vs the regular developers. Do you know if it is technically feasible to assign the rules (workflow rules, but also libraries etc to use) at folder level instead of Tenant level?

Hi Kiran,

Great anwser, and thanks for the links.

I want to understand a bit better though why you recommend a federated model in case some of the citizen developers attended automations are candidates for unattended automations. Is this because it is more practical to have them in the same tenant to assign them to other folders (where the unattended automations reside) and/or that it is cumbersome to publish the unattended automations to another tenant?

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Hi Kris,

we have to perform RPA COE assessment for all the requirement we have received from citizen developers. in this assessment we can decide whether the project should go with citizen developers or RPA Developer based on the complexity and if we go with citizen developer there we have to decide whether it should be attended or un attended. mostly i could see un attended automation we are receiving from citizen developers.

if we go with once orchestrator and multiple tenants for lot of citizen developers it would be huge mess and support team cannot monitor or take care lot of processes in different tenants better to go with one orchestrator and different folders for different subgroup/department in our organisation with federated approach each and every department specific folder need to own it by their department with the admins i mentioned below.

in my opinion federated model is well suited for citizen developer program. First step we have to identify technical developer in the subgroup/department and we have to train them in such a way that this technical developer/citizen developer admin can train the others in the same department.

in federated model citizen developer admin(technical developer we have chosen) as folder admin for that particular department/subgroup so he can manage the citizen developers under his/her department and monitor the critical processes and deploy the processes and especially he is the responsible of doing code reviews for the code developed by citizen developers.

if you have lot of citizen developers in your organization better go for this model. its nice discussing with you on this topic. please let me know if you need any additional details. we are also training citizen developer in our organization. share your thoughts as well. thanks.

Regards,
Kirankumar.

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