Citizen developers find creative ways to help Shell run safer, smarter and more efficiently with Power Platform

Over the course of nearly 200 years, Shell has evolved from a one-man business importing seashells from the Far East to an international energy company with 93,000 employees in more than 70 countries. Today the company explores, produces, refines, and markets oil and natural gas while leading the global transition to a low-carbon energy system.

Shell’s enduring spirit of innovation — anchored by its long-standing commitment to sustainable development — led the company to launch a citizen-development initiative called DIY, an acronym for “Do IT Yourself.” Relying heavily on Microsoft Power Platform, and Power Platform products Power Apps and Power Automate, DIY invites and empowers employees with no coding experience to develop low-code applications, and automation, providing innovative solutions to business problems. The result? Shell estimates that DIY has generated a significant return on investment, enabling efficiencies and cost savings. 

In just a few short years, DIY has revolutionized application development at Shell and positioned the company as an early adopter of low-code technologies. “It’s really a movement within Shell nowadays,” says Anna Sosievici, a Transformational Change Consultant at Shell. “Creating these solutions is not part of most people's day jobs. It's driven by a passion for finding creative ways to solve their business problems.”

Inspiring a DIY movement

Fostering and supporting a culture of low-code self-reliance among non-technical employees at Shell called for a deliberate approach. “It requires employees to upskill, and evolve their capabilities and data sources,” says Paul Kobylanski, who leads citizen development at Shell. “To enable and drive widespread adoption, we first had to win the hearts and minds of our community.”

Once the company leadership bought into the vision, Shell identified champions and advocates throughout the organization — most notably within lines of business. Inspiring success stories were promoted and shared through a central portal that engages and educates the community. “We used bootcamps, persona-based learning paths, and hackathons for ideation,” says Kobylanski. “The process of development was gamified, while showing the art of the possible.”

"We have coaches embedded in every community within our ecosystem,” adds Sosievici. “They provide valuable support to our developers and help launch new capabilities. They are a key part of our DIY initiative."

The emphasis on inspiration and celebration helped to make the program succeed well beyond its initial aspirations. "The original goal was to train five hundred DIY developers," says Kobylanski, "but this has now grown beyond our expectations to over 4,000 active DIY Developers across the business." As awareness of DIY and some high-value applications grew, engagement spread, and communities of practice began to form. “We embraced the philosophy that everyone — wherever they sit in the organization — can improve our operations by developing software applications,” Kobylanski explains. 

Imagining, building, solving

With 4,000 citizen developers (and growing) Shell’s DIY community is making material contributions in a variety of areas. A few examples:

• Enhancing customer and employee experiences. Customers increasingly need reliable and transparent carbon-footprint data for the products they purchase. DIY developers at Shell created a solution that allows users to easily request an overview of product-related CO₂ gas emissions that occur upstream of the product’s delivery to the customer. This streamlined collection and sharing of data — using Power Apps and Power Automate — helps Shell’s customers better understand and manage their CO₂ emissions, improving customer satisfaction and retention.
• Automating manual processes and visualizing data. The Shell Chemicals Park Moerdijk has 20 furnaces that each have 64 burners. Each burner was being manually trimmed to multiple settings to optimize energy consumption. DIY developers built and implemented an application that provides advice on specific trim settings for each furnace, allowing the furnaces to burn at an optimum efficiency — leading to considerable savings and enabling the site to operate more efficiently. The data are stored and shared to Power BI for visualization and to estimate margins.
• Improving inefficient workflows to save time and money. While building the Shell Polymers Monaca petrochemical complex in western Pennsylvania, Shell contractors had to carry out numerous lifting and hoisting operations. Before each lift could take place the Lifting and Hoisting team had to complete a manual approval process that could take up to 2.5 hours and often required staff to travel across the site. Citizen developers at Shell have made it easier, faster and safer (eliminating travel across the site) with a mobile application — one of the first DIY apps in the Americas — reducing the time to approval by about 40 percent (from 2.5 hours to about one).

“A few years ago, if you were in a business role you knew your process very well, including where they were failing or not as optimized as possible,” says Sosievici. “But you didn’t have the power to make a change unless you could make a strong business case for IT to solve the problem. Nowadays, you can solve it yourself, and that is extremely liberating for people.”

This sense of empowerment is extremely important to Shell, not only in terms of business results, but redefining the traditional roles of business and IT. “People are solving and improving things that are meaningful to them in their daily work,” Kobylanski explains, “and some of them are emerging as great developers on the platform.”. 

“We now recognize DIY as a mode of delivery,” Kobylanski continues. “As we look to prioritize and focus our IT resources on the biggest strategic programs, DIY empowers our businesses to deliver value that IT cannot always get to… which is extremely powerful.”

Looking forward, Kobylanski aims to accelerate adoption even further. “I’d like to see DIY even more widely adopted, like enterprise desktop tools of the past. In addition, I think the future of developing solutions is about to change - from writing lines of code to something more creative where machines build through the power of voice alone. With innovations like Copilot for Power Platform, the possibilities for creative and efficient solution development seem boundless. These are the moments that change the way we look at technology, right?”

Find out more about Shell on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.