How IBM is creating a Flutter Center of Excellence
Learn why and how IBM makes their clients successful with Flutter
The basics of a good client engagement include two critical factors: wise use of resources and timely delivery.
In today’s mobile and digital-first world, clients have exponentially increased their expectations for experiences, speed, personalization, and convenience. Using Flutter, developers and designers can create beautiful cross-platform web and mobile applications faster, and more efficiently.
Why we’re expanding our Flutter practice
Flutter helps us deliver client projects faster
By targeting multiple platforms from a single codebase, our team can prototype, refine and deploy client apps faster than ever. With Flutter, we can deliver projects three times as fast — without sacrificing quality.
During the early days of the Covid-19 crisis, the government of Bizkaia, Spain approached IBM to help keep its citizens informed of the latest actions and news. They needed a mobile app — in two weeks. With Flutter, the first version of the app was published in just 11 days. It quickly became the third most-downloaded app in the region.
“In such a constrained timeframe, Flutter came to our rescue. It was the quickest hard decision we took and one of the most relevant we made. Building the app both for iOS and Android was like having super powers for our development team and beating the race against the clock.”
— IBM Project Director Joanra Mallart
Flutter helps our clients get more for less
Delivering great user experiences is always at the forefront of our mind. However, many clients have tight budgets, which often requires foregoing platforms or features that would help their apps succeed. With Flutter, we’re able to exceed client expectations by building without compromise.
Customers are asking about Flutter
Flutter has grown in popularity — as seen in the recent StackOverflow report that lists it as the most popular UI framework. As such, we’ve seen a sharp increase in customers coming to us asking how they can use Flutter in their applications. Developers and business stakeholders alike are interested in making use of Flutter’s benefits.
Seamless collaboration with Google
As a premier Google Cloud partner, IBM and Google already have a close relationship. By adopting Flutter, we’re able to take advantage of seamless integration between developer offerings while leveraging support from the Google team where necessary.
How we’re building a center of excellence
For decades, IBM has been at the forefront of user-centric mobile innovation, led by IBM iX, the experience and design partner within IBM Consulting. We’ve been delivering exceptional mobile experiences to clients across the globe in our 60 IBM iX studios with over 15,000 development, design, and strategy practitioners.
However, with a large, distributed team, it was vital to create a single place for knowledge sharing. Creating a center of excellence helps our team recommend best practices, reuse learnings and celebrate customer wins in a consolidated community.
Here’s what we prioritized for creating an IBM Consulting center of excellence for Flutter development and design:
1. Host a regular community forum
At IBM, we host a quarterly Flutter community call. On this call, developers and designers can share learnings from client engagements, discuss new Flutter and Dart features, and get updates from the broader Flutter community.
2. Create an environment for asking questions
We’ve created a dedicated chat room where developers and designers can ask Flutter-specific questions at any time. We have a group of Flutter experts who jump in to help troubleshoot issues or recommend specific approaches.
3. Centralize knowledge sharing and reusable components
Many client projects share similarities in their architecture. Therefore, we’ve created simple project templates that practitioners can pull from to expedite their development.
4. Build educational materials for clients
While many clients know about Flutter’s benefits, some might want to better understand how Flutter can help them. Building off the Flutter pitch deck, we’ve developed materials to educate clients on how Flutter differs from other frameworks. We’ve created a central repository of client case studies to easily showcase how Flutter has helped past clients.
5. Create a learning path for Flutter practitioners
At IBM, practitioners can become certified in specific technologies or areas. We’ve created a dedicated learning path to help developers learn Flutter and apply those learnings to new client engagements. When a practitioner completes this path, they’re recorded as a Flutter practitioner in our database — so it’s easy to quickly staff Flutter engagements.
By creating this center of excellence, we’ve helped our practitioners expedite their Flutter learning. With this information, we can deliver client projects better and faster.
The Future: Fueling Excellence in Flutter
To date, IBM has seen major success in delivering Flutter projects. Our clients include global banks, federal and state governments, and international military personnel. We have also delivered numerous proofs of concept around the world.
With Flutter’s agility and IBM Consulting’s legacy of innovation, we’re on a path to shape outstanding mobile experiences that resonate with businesses and their customers. As we embrace this new phase of collaboration, we invite you to join us on this transformative journey.
Reach out today and discover how IBM Consulting can empower your business with the speed, efficiency, and excellence of Flutter.
John Mutter is the Global CTO Experience Engineering at IBM and an IBM Distinguished Engineer.
