New CoE Guidelines to Optimize Appian Application Management

Appian's Center of Excellence (CoE), part of our Professional Services offerings, provides on-going services to impart governance and best practices related to Appian BPM deployments. Ultimately, our CoE's mission is to support the BPM knowledge transfer that makes our customers and partners self-sufficient in driving their own BPM programs.

This week the Appian CoE is releasing an update to its best practices regarding organization and management of applications built on Appian. The new set of guidelines are part of the Change and Configuration Management track of Appian's proven STAR methodology (Strategize, Transform, Actualize and Rollout). They outline the differences between managing a code base in a custom application and Appian's Application objects. These guidelines have been compiled from experiences and data our Professional Services team has collected over numerous engagements of varying sizes and complexities.

The best practices describe managing application objects in different parts of the release cycle, as well as deployment procedures to follow depending on the size of the application. Some of the topics covered include:

• Basic application assembly process
• Maintenance of shared objects
• Full vs. patch application deployments
• Database change management for Appian
• Application hotfix releases

Following these updated recommended Application Change Management best practices will:

• Decrease risk during deployment
• Reduce maintenance
• Allow an increase in development team size
• Greatly reduce new environment setup time
• Speed up release cycles

The Appian CoE provides information such as this as a free service to all Appian customers and partners via our Appian Forum online community resources. View the new documentation on Forum and start applying these practices to your Appian platform deployments today.

Mike Cichy, Principal Consultant, Appian Center of Excellence