An Unlikely Road: BA to BRM and Why It Makes Sense

Somewhere along the way in my academic journey I read Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” and I can honestly say it struck me as being so profound. I wasn’t exactly sure why I found it to be enlightening as a young undergrad (maybe because I knew I had to speak to it in class), but I knew that somehow it would come back into play later in life, beyond the presentation I had to do that week. Like most people, I had career aspirations that had nothing to do with being a BRM or IT—or so I thought. It wasn’t until recently that I realized so many of my career experiences were in fact a road less taken, ultimately leading me on a progression path from a Business Analyst to a Business Relationship Manager. As the BRM discipline rapidly grows and demand and relevance to IT organizations increases, the questions arise as to who should fill these roles.

Where do you find good BRMs? How do you even define a good BRM? In my humble opinion, the answers to those questions are easy: a great Business Analyst.

Why do successful BAs make great BRMs? The similarities of the roles and the skills needed for success go hand in hand.

Some may ask, “How do the skills that serve a BA well also serve a BRM?” Now, by no means am I tooting my own horn, but I will use my own experiences as a solid business case, so to speak.

Leading into my role as a BA, my progression included stints in Civic Planning, Account Management, Quality Assurance and Internal Audit, and Training. Each of these roles challenged me to sharpen my communication and organizational skills, critical thinking, curiosity, and most importantly, patience. (Quite honestly, my adolescent years spent working in movie theaters and a well-known, kid-friendly pizza restaurant also helped sharpen my communication skills, patience, and endurance. Another story for another day). After spending around seven years exercising the skills in the aforementioned roles, I was presented with the opportunity to progress into a BA role. It simply made sense. True enough, I had limited technical skills, but I did have intimate knowledge of some of the major business systems and applications used within the company. The charge was now to put the acquired skills to use a little differently. Listening to requirements (not just gathering), documenting processes, reviewing and challenging the processes established, delivering a finished product that brought improvement and established efficiencies, organization, and public speaking were all standard exercises in those roles. Continuing Education classes allowed for the technical deficits to be addressed. The combination of those high level tech skills with verbal and written communication, soft skills, and critical thinking are the makings of a Business Analyst, for most companies.

My company officially began using BRMs in our Enterprise IT model around 2011, but it was new to the company and had not yet matured. The role was filled by people with various backgrounds—some former Project Managers, others former Product Managers. As the BRM leader began to focus more on how to mature the role within our company, it became evident that the need for the role required people with BA type skills, in addition to the ability to function primarily in a business-facing manner. Our IT organization operates in an ITIL/Service Management framework, therefore the business is your customer. We quickly learned to drive business value “with the business,” we needed much more than alignment and referring to the business as our customer. This realization laid the foundation to allow for the ability to position an IT and business convergence that could focus on building the business strategy with the businesses, while also ensuring that IT provided a solutions roadmap that enabled the business strategy.

The responsibilities of the BRM often include assisting the business in determining what is necessary in their IT budget, while making sure the initiatives in that budget are converged with their business strategy. This task can often be a slippery slope, especially when the business may not view IT or the BRM as part of their team. The need to challenge why the business is making plans to move forward with certain technology products or services may not be an instinctual action for some, but great BAs tend to be curious and ask why. This curiosity often sparks conversation with the business that drives them to explore what they are truly trying to accomplish. Is there some type of efficiency gain to a process? Is there a cost savings the business could leverage? Does the use of a particular tool or service help the business stay relevant in their respective market if there no efficiency gain, and what is the value of that relevance? A BAs curiosity can drive conversations around value and potential ROI, and ultimately lead to the elements needed for Value Harvesting.

As our organization continued to mature our BRM group, it became evident that we needed more penetration into the business. It wasn’t effective enough just to be a liaison, which may be a common case with most companies that use BRMs. After all, you want the business to be open enough with you to help them determine what their requirements are. Great BAs typically use various methods to identify who their key stakeholders are, who the true decision makers are, and who actually has enough understanding of processes to provide accurate requirements. Our BRM organization’s approach was to develop and maintain relationship or business unit plans. This involved identifying and documenting key business stakeholders amongst the leadership levels, the supporters and non-supporters of IT, the influencers of leadership, and how to best approach these stakeholders to gather requirements to support the business strategy through the IT strategy. The exercise would be tedious for some people, but for a BA, it’s another exercise in discovery and requirements gathering. The account plan can be referenced to help guide the BRM on how best to approach a stakeholder when a decision is needed. It can even be used to indicate who to take a new product or service change to in order to influence resistors. Often, the BA has already had multiple interactions with some of these stakeholders when gathering requirements for projects, so the exercise has already been done to some degree.

In my own career progression from start to BRM, the BA role was essential in preparing me for what I face every day. The similarities of the skill sets needed are a natural fit and progression. Know the business, understand the business’s needs, present solutions, and most importantly, utilize “soft” skills to establish a relationship with the business partner that drives them to allow you into their business as a Trusted Advisor and Strategic Partner. Still, the BA role was not the penultimate step for me in my BA to BRM progression, as there was a stop made as a BRM Analyst. But that, my friends, is another article for another day. Not a likely road to take, but “it has made all the difference.” I myself am anxious to find out what the next logical progression is for the great BRM.

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Works Cited

Frost, Robert. Mountain Interval: The Road Not Taken. Henry Holt And Company, 1916