In anticipation of her co-presentation at Building Business Capability in Vegas, Nov. 2 – 6, 2015, we asked Jeanine Bradley, Senior Manager, Rules and Process Management at Railinc, a few questions about pursuing business excellence. Check out her interview in relation to her BBC co-presentation entitled Defining & Selling Strategic Change Programs at Railinc.

Q: How is your organization advancing the pursuit of business excellence and how does it impact your business units/departments?

A: We are actively pursuing Business Benefits Realization derived from the integration of our products among our customers.  This impact is multi-faceted, in that it pervades our customer approach, our pricing models and our project/program metrics.  It is an extremely challenging and very interesting  journey in maturity – to be able to integrate and measure benefits among competing organizations, who are our primary customers.

Q: Can you describe the challenges you face or have already overcome in establishing a more cohesive and productive company or organization?

A: We are unique with our parent company being a Trade Association (Association of American Railroads); our customers are in effect also our owners. This creates a business model with unique challenges which results in making it difficult to balance and fund competing priorities. We are maturing critical business capabilities encompassing people, process and technology in an “all hands on deck” environment focused on project delivery and customer satisfaction. It has been very challenging to incorporate the work the program needs to accomplish while not impacting our intense focus on project based work.

Q: What are your near term goals for creating a more agile organization at your business or company?

A: Maturing our Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) specifically focused on business rules and business processes. We are upskilling our business analysts and development teams, developing roadmaps to modernize the technical aspects of our applications and designing a governance framework for long term sustainability.

Q: What’s the most valuable thing you’ve learned in 2015 thus far? What’s the most important goal/trend for [pick one or two: business analysts, business architects, business process managers and/or business rules managers] to keep in mind?

A: Not every Business Analyst is ready to learn and actively apply more mature techniques for business rules and business processes.  For Railinc, we have a goal of identifying the competencies needed to support the techniques we are bringing into the company and working to target training time and budget to build those competencies.  We are using a combination of the IIBA Competency Model and Self-Assessment tool and Business Rule Solutions methodologies.

Q: What’s the latest method/process/tool you have implemented to help your organization or business run more efficiently and effectively?

A: Business vocabulary concept models using the RulesXpress tool.

Q: If you could give your five-years-ago self-insight and advice about this industry, what would you say?

A: Fact: Externalizing business logic drives customer value

Q: Sneak preview: Please tell us a take-away that you will provide during your talk at Building Business Capability.

A: Understanding your stakeholders and audiences is a critical success factor to developing your story line, designing your future state, selling your solution and managing implementation of the program.

—————————–

Don’t miss Jeanine’s co-presentation, Defining & Selling Strategic Change Programs at Railinc, at Building Business Capabilityon Wednesday, November 4, 2015 from 2:00 to 3:00 pm.  Click here to register for attendance.