Beginning my Journey with Bahmni

The first thing I learned about ThoughtWorks were the pillars we follow to become a great company. While reading about them, my perspective towards TW changed immediately:

“There’s an IT company that not only cares about its business and innovation but also helping society!”

After that, P3 was the reason I wanted to become a ThoughtWorker. It is amazing that this passion has just found its place after I got assigned to the Bahmni Project.

My journey with Bahmni just started with a Bahmni Implementation Training Program held in the Bangalore Office. The expectations for this training were not to become an expert in implementation but to gain a broad and deep overview of the application’s functionality and configurability.

The training course started by giving us Bahmni’s big picture, technical and social. We learned that Bahmni is a collection of powerful open source applications stitched together to fulfill the necessities of low resource medical centers. It was clear that the main intention of this project was to use already proven technologies, so that developers could focus in one the most important aspects, the User.

After understanding Bahmni’s context and functionality, we learned how to configure the application and participated in a project’s simulation. Bahmni gives an impressive amount of configurability and flexibility, so that implementers are able to match the client’s expectations. These ideas were put to test through a final project, where we simulated a Bahmni implementation to strengthen the knowledge we gained during the training program. At the end of the project, we had a feedback session where we understood the limitations of Bahmni´s configurability and identified the right moment to seek help from the product development team.

One word that summarizes my experience in this training program is Empowerment. I feel this program helped me understand the context of the project and how to find solutions in a self sufficient way. Although I still find some features challenging to configure, this course gave me sufficient knowledge and skills to feel confident while implementing. I feel really grateful to ThoughtWorks for giving me the chance to be involved in this program and the trainers that helped me go through every training session.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the author are personal to the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of ThoughtWorks.