Measure Your BRM to Change Your BRM

by Jeremy Byrne

Now, no one really wants to blow their own trumpet, peacock feathers splayed, and go strutting up and down the workplace shouting about how great they are. However, sometimes this behaviour is necessary to measure your effectiveness and how well your function is performing—although you may want to keep the peacock feathers to a minimum!

The reasons for this can be easily categorised into the familiar Run, Grow, and Transform framework:

• Run – Firstly, it may be a requirement from your organisation to justify your existence, so to survive and run the BRM function you may need to measure your effectiveness and report back to your superiors proving your function is still a valuable asset.
• Grow – This is to bid for additional resources to be applied to your function; in the case of BRM this is almost always additional staff resources. Generally because of the great successes and huge benefits the function brings, but that doesn’t mean you don’t need to prove it from time to time.
• Transform – Lastly, you may want to measure your effectiveness to help transform the function to focus on either new areas or shift some resources onto a particular area. This may be due to a change in strategy from the organisation, or because there is a particular piece of value that has been identified. Either way, this could highlight both the additional value in another direction, or a loss of value in an area you need to move away from.

So now that you have a good understanding of why you want to measure your effectiveness, how do you start?

There are a number of quantitative and qualitative measures that could be focused upon, and this number will vary hugely between organisations. Quantitative measures could be high-level figures, such as the number of projects delivered in a particular strategic area or the value delivered to a particular business unit over a period of time. You could also focus on the value beyond the internal business, such as a measure on customer experience feedback into the organisation. The qualitative areas are harder to measure in an objective and unbiased way; often, multiple viewpoints need to be gathered to investigate low scores and any differences.

Lastly, take particular care when selecting the criteria for measuring the effectiveness of your BRM function, as it not only has to hold true and be relevant now, it also needs to maintain that level of relevance for years to come. Otherwise, when you analyse your year-on-year trends, you may find that you no longer have the data you need to help you Run, Grow, or Transform your BRM function into the direction you desire—and this data is the critical first step to being able to measure effectiveness. After all, before you make a change, you need to know exactly where you’re coming from.