In anticipation of his presentation at Building Business Capability in Vegas, Nov. 2 – 6, 2015, we asked Tom Bellinson, Sr. Project Manager of the University of Michigan Medical School, a few questions about pursuing business excellence. Check out his interview in relation to his BBC presentation entitled The Odd Couple: Business Process Management and Agile Design.

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

A: I belong to the IT organization for the University of Michigan Medical School.  We have multiple groups within our organization, but the one I work within is responsive for custom software delivery. Our mission is to provide solutions when COTS alternatives are inadequate or unavailable.

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

A: Our organization moved into a large collaboration space a few years ago and adopted an Agile philosophy.  We are still on our journey, but we are far ahead of other software development organizations within the University IT community. The team structure we use on a daily basis regularly comes in conflict with the larger university culture, but we’re still better off for it.

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

A: Our latest push is to focus on developing a longer term product roadmap that aligns with governance all the way up through our organization. We believe that establishing a more stable project backlog will allow us to spin up new projects more cleanly by engaging the right people in time to hit the ground running.

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: This year I learned that large organizations have a mind, body and spirit. The mind represents the rules, policies and organizational structures; the body is the work that gets done; and the spirit is the culture and politics. As technical folks, we tend to sometimes overlook the spirit. This is almost always a bad idea.

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

A: We are about to roll out our first application of Red Hat’s JBoss Data Virtualization tool. We are very excited about the potential of this tool to make disparate data sources available to our research community that relies so heavily on data to conduct their work.

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

A: I would have told myself to pay more attention to open source tools. Back then, I was all about the Microsoft platform and I still think it is great, but even Microsoft seems to be moving towards more open tools or tools that connect easier with other open tools and standards.

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

A: Spoiler alert! Despite apparent philosophical differences between BPM and Agile, the two can and should coexist.

Q: What do you hope to gain from this year’s conference?

A: I hope to make lots of new friends and learn new things.  If you see me, please stop and say “hi!”

Don’t miss Tom’s presentation, The Odd Couple: Business Process Management and Agile Design, at Building Business Capability on Thursday, November 5, 2015 from 8:00 to 8:50 am. Click here to register for attendance.