Allies in Strategic Purpose: When Project Managers and BRMs Converge
Shared ownership and strategic purpose within an organization can only be cultivated when each role and its responsibilities are clearly defined and recognized. Two particularly crucial roles, Business Relationship Managers (BRMs) and Project Managers (PMs), drive organizational success when effectively converged.
Convergence of BRMs and Project Managers
Convergence, collaboration, coordination? All represent working together on various levels in which one cannot succeed without the other to create value demand.
Consequently, when BRM and PM roles remain separated and unrelated within the ideation and intake process, a barrier to the selection and prioritization of projects exists, resulting in team inefficiencies.
Mutual reliance between BRMs and PMs only occurs when each role recognizes the value provided by the other. In turn, this enforces value-driven strategic purpose within the organization in its entirety.
BRMs and Project Managers Drive Reciprocal Value
The collaboration between BRMs and PMs throughout the intake and ideation of organizational projects allows for a mutual understanding of ‘why’. In other words, each role knows the weight of the strategic value of any given project.
Conversely, mutual convergence allows for both roles to acknowledge drawbacks if they choose not to pursue current projects or solutions under consideration.
Let’s break down the true value BRMs and PMs provide one another and for enterprises as a whole.
BRMs provide value by:
- Driving strategic thinking through problem-solving, goal setting, and addressing objectives early on
- Setting projects up for success with strategies developed from concrete goals
- Initiating efforts with an ‘outside-the-box’ mentality
- Gaining credibility by representing business partners’ best interests
- Meeting project deadlines
Project Managers provide value by:
- Driving value-generating ideas to fruition
- Setting and managing expectations for business partners by keeping everyone on task throughout the course of the project
- Ensuring quality and healthy delivery of completed projects
- Promoting credibility through results
Perhaps the best way to demonstrate the value coming from this mutual convergence lies in the success story of an organization that did it right.
Successful Synergy: Larimer County
Nebulous Ideation and Intake
Larimer County, CO underwent a successful convergence between their PM role and BRM capability; as explained by the first webinar of the Allies in Strategic Purpose Series.
Larimer County underwent several iterations of their ideation and intake process after implementing BRM Institute’s core principles. Prior to the introduction of BRM, their process lacked definition and remained nebulous; causing frustration for their business partners.
Originally, Larimer County’s project management team bore high-level responsibilities with little-to-no authority to enforce neither their recommendations nor their strategies. Ideation and intake became a perpetual pit of the wrong conversations happening at the wrong time.
Six months into the implementation of BRM roles and the convergence with their PMs, Larimer County’s team structure successfully shifted for the better.
Driving Organizational Value
Currently, PMs within Larimer County manage the entire lifecycle of each project, track and analyze the deliverables, and adapt as needed through effective communication and collaboration with their BRMs.
BRMs embody the role of “connectors, orchestrators, and navigators”, responsible for their organization’s ideation and demand generation.
As a result, the synergy created by the convergence of BRMs and PMs within Larimer County successfully yielded:
- The ability to set timelines and expectations for prioritization
- Clear roles, responsibilities, and hand-offs
- Improved internal transparency of their ideation pipeline
- Improved capacity planning and workload estimations
- Assurance that projects contribute to strategic goals
- Team-wide participation in value optimization
- Efficient project completion rates
When BRMs and PMs converge, working in tandem within an organization, they use their clearly defined roles to improve the overall workflow of value planning, reporting structure, and demand shaping.
Ultimately, this partnership establishes the foundation of shared ownership and perpetuates organizational success.
Thank you to Larimer County’s Quality and Operations Division for sharing their insights and growth as they’ve implemented BRM capabilities within their organization. Click here to listen to the full webinar!
If you enjoyed learning about how BRMs drive strategic value with Project Managers, tune in on Wednesday, July 10, 2019 for the next webinar in the series – Allies in Strategic Purpose: BRMs and Business Analysts.
