Business Relationship Manager Meetings with Business Partners

Imagine you are an executive leader for a major corporation looking for strategies to move your business department forward. While enjoying your morning coffee, catching up on emails, you notice the weekly company updates email blast announcing a new BRM (Business Relationship Manager) will be starting next week partnering with your line of business.

“What is a BRM? Partnering?!?” you ask yourself, and then go on about your day.

A week later, the new BRM stops in and introduces herself: “Hello, Executive Director! I’d like to set up some time to review your business strategy and how I can help converge and shape IT to deliver business capabilities that will make a tangible difference for you. We will also discuss how I can assist building Idea documents, business cases, value plans, and ensure REAL Business value results long after the project is completed.”

As the Executive Director, you are excited about the enthusiastic new hire standing in your doorway, but wonder to yourself, “Is she selling snake oil?” Curiously… “I have heard this before, but never from IT?” With the usual friendly but guarded handshake you welcome the BRM into the organization and instruct her to meet with your directors and see what great things can be accomplished. You ask her to report back on  progress with your directors.

The Art of Business Relationship Management and the “Three Rights”

The golden rule of business relationship management is: Add Value in Every Interaction. As a BRM, you must manage relationships with many different levels of the organization. I have seen BRMs that maintain a relationship with the CEO and all the way down throughout the organization. Everyone knows that time is limited in the business world. To manage all these relationships, the BRM must add value in every interaction or else he will never get the time of day with the leaders of the organization.

Establishing the right cadence of routine interactions and value delivered (information shared) in these meetings is critical.  An effective BRM relies on the three rights: knowing the right level of knowledge to share, for the right audience, and at the right time.

The CEO and Senior Executives

Routine meetings with the CEO and senior executives of the organization are the pinnacle of the BRM role. If you have earned a seat at the table with the organizational leadership, you know you are truly excelling and adding significant value. This leadership group requires irregular interaction, usually once a month or once a quarter. The initial meeting should be for the BRM to explain their role and then listen to the vision of the executive. Subsequent meetings focus on major value delivered in partnership with the directors reporting into these executives as well as major activities over the next few weeks/months till you meet again. Often the directors will be in the meeting as well.

Line of Business Directors

The LOB (line of business) Directors will usually want to meet monthly or every two weeks. These routine meetings will initially focus on the outstanding work that the Director feels is not moving forward. Your job as the BRM is to gain a few quick wins by guiding IT to the needed execution, ensuring already framed up projects move forward. The second focus of the meetings is the three-year strategy. Where does the LOB Director need to go to move the needle for the organization? Using strategic facilitation skills, work with the LOB Director to build or confirm a long term strategy. Once the strategy is defined, identify missing capabilities that your service provider team can bring to fruition.  Subsequent meetings will confirm the business strategy, confirm the relationship maturity level between Business and IT and how it might be improved.  These meetings will cover the Relationship Strategy-on-a-Page as defined in the BRM Institute Business Relationship Management Interactive Body of Knowledge (BRMiBOK) which included the shared vision for the BRM-business partner relationship, relationship characteristics, performance measures, key initiatives, and operating principles for the relationship.  

When the business asks you, “Why are we talking about the strategy for the next three years when your IT team can’t even deliver what I need right now?!?!” The answer to this is simple: “That is why we need to define the three year strategy, so we can identity needs, request funding to deliver on those needs, and then shape the delivery organization to deliver on them and stop any projects that are consuming resources but will not add value.”

Project Meetings

For ideas that have not moved past the Ideation phase, the BRMs must work with the business to craft Idea Documents, possibly business cases (if the resources are major), including the value and value plan for a project. Once a project is approved to move forward, the BRM switches to an executive stakeholder for the project and allows the project manager and solution delivery team to execute on the project. The BRM holds the PM and project team accountable for tracking to the value management plan. BRMs will be involved anytime project scope is questioned (changed) and in any project stakeholder meeting.

Solution Delivery Meetings

Solution delivery managers will often hold routine meetings with the business to review exceptions to progress on active projects for a given LOB (there is no value reviewing anything that is on track as the business can read about these in project status reports if need be). The BRMs attend these meetings to ensure they are aware of the exceptions and then assist facilitating any necessary scope changes as a result.

IT Meetings

Often the BRM reports into the CIO or some other executive leader of IT. An often overlooked step for BRMs is to ensure they are communicating success and challenges back to their own leadership. The meetings are usually monthly with frequent levels of other communication in between meetings. As BRMs spend the majority of their time with business partners, it is imperative the provider leadership is updated with progress.

Back to the story…

You will be a successful BRM with the above-listed schedule of interactions. When you go back to that Executive to report progress as requested from the story in the beginning of this post, you will have a very succinct list of accomplishments to review what you, the business partner, and the service provider were able to accomplish as a unified team moving the organization forward.