Driving Business Value: A New CoI

Driving value is a key tenet of BRM and a growing field of interest within our single global community. In demonstration of this, we are excited to announce the most recent addition to the BRM family, the Driving Business Value CoI.

Communities of Interest (CoI) serve as powerful tools in the world of Business Relationship Management (BRM). CoIs form when a group of like-minded BRMs come together to help each other overcome both common, and uncommon, challenges. They may form around shared interests, industry or geography. CoIs may also form around ideas and concepts by linking business professionals from around the globe.

The topic based CoI for Senior Executive Engagementis for BRMs interested in engaging with senior executive leaders and influencing strategic direction and execution. There is also the Nordics CoI, which supports BRMs in Scandinavian countries who felt disconnected from other regional peers.

The Driving Business Value CoI helps BRMs guide their organizations down a value-focused path. Today, many organizations fall short of their goals due to a misalignment between value and strategy. Senior leadership becomes frustrated when they fail to optimize delivered value.

Founded by Peter Lijnse, Leanne McGiveron, and Elka Schriver, the Driving Business Value CoI addresses this misalignment by providing members with a variety of resources and advice from successful BRMs.

Through interactions with this CoI, BRMs share knowledge on topics focused around value creation, value plans, measuring value, and optimizing value. They share and learn how other BRMs guide their organizations towards value optimization throughout every operational phase.

Driving Business Value CoI co-founder, Leanne McGiveron, explains how this works by citing an example from her own work.

“As we began our work at Purdue with value management, it was apparent that this area would deliver the highest return on our work with strategic business partners. It is critical that we excel at all phases from ideation to performance metrics. With the Institute introducing a Community of Interest around this topic, it will enable the membership to come together and discuss; strengthening the scholarship and work around value management.”

This CoI names their top three goals to help improve the worldwide BRM community:

To promote the need for companies to become more value-focused
To answer questions from the members around value, ideas and measuring
To build a network of members that have experience with driving business value

Peter Lijnse coaches BRM teams on how to optimize their capabilities, and how to provide the most value for their organizations. He has served as an advisor and instructor for the Knowledge Management Team since 2013. In 2017, he received the BRM Excellence Award for his beneficial impact on the BRM community through his teaching. @peterjlijnse

Leanne McGiveron leads a BRM team as Associate Director, for Purdue Univeristy’s College of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine. She holds experience in CoI leadership, after serving as Co-Lead for the Leaders and Higher Education Community of Interest.

Elka Schriver works as a facilitator and coach with Lead the Pack Consulting. She focuses on discovering how to best articulate and deliver business value, and on teaching BRMs how to follow suit. Elka achieves this through writing for BRM Institute’s Body of Knowledge (BRMBOK™).

By building a network of value-focused BRMs, these members will build their very own pool of knowledge, enabling them to identify and implement initiatives more rapidly over time. Even though the leaders behind this CoI hail from different backgrounds, their dedication to the role leads them towards the same goal of delivering business value.