The Journey to Build a High Value-Delivering BRM Organization
You don’t decide to drive to an unfamiliar city without planning your route, and the same is true for establishing the BRM role within your organization. Whether you’re leading a team of BRMs or you are the BRM, it’s important that you determine what success looks like and how you will get there before embarking on the journey.
Several years ago, I was offered the opportunity to lead a team of BRMs for an IT organization. I knew immediately that I would need a long-term plan to get us to the strategic value-delivering organization that my leadership desired.
My initial step was to sit down with leadership to lay out a high-level plan that consisted of employee evaluations (and transitions), establishing operational consistency, driving organizational synergy within the team and our partners, tool development, and eventually, measurement. These are not overnight activities—they had to be carried out in a timely manner that advanced the BRM role forward, but simultaneously didn’t disenfranchise the team.
The first six-to-twelve months were mostly business as usual, such as addressing staffing needs and collaborating on improvements to engagement and operations. This was a great way to assess the team’s level of engagement and identify the leaders, performers, and attendees.
Leaders are those team members who contribute to the conversation by challenging thought processes constructively. They surface ideas of their own that feed the conversation, process development, team collaboration, and chemistry.
Performers are those who participate in conversations, but rarely surface their own ideas or go above and beyond in developing the role. Performers will do what’s required of them with high quality and are motivated by personal recognition.
Attendees simply show up. They don’t necessarily contribute in conversation, and they perform their responsibilities to the minimum requirement.
Leading and establishing a high-functioning team requires you to leverage the four Ds and determine what to Do, Delegate, Defer, or Drop. To maintain momentum, develop a certain level of trust and confidence in those you delegate—you wouldn’t want to delegate a critical process development activity to a performer to lead, but it would be perfectly fine to give them a task like answering questions that are instrumental to the team’s decision-making.
In this scenario, change was introduced incrementally to operations by assessing the team and managing transitions. As the team met for regular staff and working sessions, we focused on performance expectations, team dynamics, our environmental opportunities and challenges, deliverable development, and organizational branding. Next came communication.
BRM communication methods have to meet the needs of both the business and the provider, while covering different levels within both organizations. In order to cover both horizontal and vertical communication, focus on deliverable creation and the processes to support their development.
During these conversations, ask yourself a few key questions:
- Who are your customers?
- What do you need to provide to them?
- How often do you need to provide it to them?
- How would you provide it to them?
- Why is it important to provide it in this manner?
Going down this path helps determine what deliverables you need to create, enhance, or drop, as well as how often these deliverable or communication sessions need to be produced, updated, or facilitated. Lastly, you’ll be able to determine how you would go about executing operational tasks while developing and nurturing relationships within the business areas.
“If you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it.
“If you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it.
“If you don’t measure it, you probably don’t care.
“If you can’t influence it, then don’t measure it.”
– Measuring ITSM, Randy Steinberg
Measuring the quality of the relationship, value delivered, and strategic alignment are all subjective on the surface. When assessed as a singular performance metric, it can be full of personal perspective – influenced by the BRM’s personal relationship with the respondent rather than the their actual performance.
Instead, take the following approach:
- Train BRMs as a way of ensuring consistency across BRMs’ understanding of the mission, approach, tools available to them, performance, and operational expectations.
- Level-set expectations within the business and provider domain. Strategize about how you communicate these expectations just as much as you strategize on how to meet customer demands.
- Assess whether BRMs meet expectations before jumping into a direct measure of the quality of BRM relationships and the value delivered. When we asked ourselves, “What are the behaviors of a high-value relationship?” answers like “Saving me money,” “Improving my operations,” and “Keeping me out of trouble” came up. You can apply information like this to the BRM Institute competencies as a means of assessing BRM performance. For example, BRM Institute identifies portfolio management as a competency of the BRM. By determining the key performance indicators (KPIs) of portfolio management from both the business and provider perspectives, you can question whether projects are planned and coordinated to minimize impact to the business operations. The score provided by the business and provider is a strong indicator of whether the BRM is meeting the expectations of portfolio management.
Over time, strong performance in competency execution drives value realization and strong relationships. At this point, the business, provider, and BRM operate in concert and understand how to engage and leverage the other.
Whether you’re the leader of a BRM organization or an individual BRM, you must be out in front with your finger on the pulse of both the business and provider. In order for the BRM to evolve, identify operational activities that deliver value to the business and the provider. This inevitably leads to building the trust needed to position the BRM at the strategy table.
Tony brings over 20 years of IT experience to the table, ranging from communications engineering to application software development and project management. Tony began his BRM journey in 2010, when the role became a natural fit for his background after operating as a facilitator/broker between the technical teams and business areas. He brings an engineering, IT, and customer service perspective to the BRM role, and most recently, he has served as the manager of a BRM team at Salt River Project in Phoenix, Arizona. He has been a member of BRM Institute since its inception and was a member of the inaugural BRMP® class.
You make some good points about consistency, Tony. I think there is a misconception among BRMs that the business to provider relationship cannot be measured or assessed in a consistent way. It may take some effort to tailor the tools to your specific organization and situation, but it is definitely worthwhile. This consistency allows your BRM group to present a unified message that promotes confidence and trust from the business and the provider.
Nice read. Thanks Tony!