The time between technology product releases has dropped dramatically in recent years, but many companies still struggle to meet their development schedules, especially when it comes to mobile projects.

That’s the conclusion OutSystems Inc. draws in a newly published survey of more than 3,200 information technology personnel in 40 countries. The study, which is the fourth of its kind that the development automation firm has published to date, saw 62 percent of the participants report to having a backlog of mobile projects. The number of apps stuck in the queue as high as 10 or more at some organizations.

The first issue weighing down on development teams is the abruptness with which mobility has hit the agenda in the enterprise. Smartphones and tablets aren’t a new phenomenon, but many traditional companies are only now starting to embrace the trend fully. OutSystems’ study found that mobile support has jumped five places on respondents’ list of application priorities since 2015 to become the most common business requirement.

For the organizations that are still struggling to adjust, the difficulty of the shift only adds to all the other challenges involved in mobile development. OutSystems discovered that one of the biggest issues in 2016 was a lack of talent. More than 40 percent of the respondents to its survey said their organizations suffer from a “knowledge gap” in app development, while 37 percent pinpointed a shortage of mobile programmers as their problem.

And that’s not even mentioning the issues involved in the app development process itself. OutSystems’ study flags the length of mobile projects as a particularly big challenge: Some 44 percent of participants said that they’re unsatisfied with the pace of development at their companies. About 76 percent reported that their organizations typically require longer than three months to build a new mobile offering, while 11 percent said that the average project drags on for over a year.

As a result, there’s growing demand for tools that can reduce the amount of coding involved in mobile projects. A full 44 percent of the IT professionals who partook in the study said that they’re either already using or considering to adopt such a solution, which OutSystems believes bodes well for its long-term prospects. The company offers a “low-code” development platform that promises to let companies develop mobile apps in as little as a few weeks.

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