Measuring a Maestro: How to Really Assess a BRM Capability

You just have been asked to measure the performance of your company’s Business Relationship Management team. Your heart skips a beat; it’s not an easy task, and there is a lot at stake. This is because BRMs employ a unique skill set—each BRM is a maestro, orchestrating business relationships with great finesse in order to discover, create, harvest, and optimize business value. So, how will you go about measuring the BRM team’s performance?

Well, for starters, this is fundamentally the wrong question.

In order to successfully assess performance, you must first ensure you understand it. Therefore, the vital question is:

• What business dilemma is the company trying to solve?

Or, put another way,

• What business decision is the organization trying to make?

This strategic alignment can direct subsequent questions toward driving organizational value. Business is better when everyone works in concert, and your performance measurements should support the direction of the company. The following tips are instrumental in effectively measuring BRM capability and driving corporate value.

Let’s look at the task at hand and consider your BRM team. What was the logic behind introducing a BRM capability within your corporation? What is important about the BRM role within your company? How is the role helping to improve the company’s performance? The deeper you delve into the answers to these questions, the better you will understand what problems the BRM team is supposed to solve.

Note that measuring BRM team performance is not an end unto itself; the ultimate purpose is to help execute business strategy. Therefore, carefully consider why you might pick certain performance measures over others. For instance, you might be trying to validate a strategic vision, direct the team to achieve specific targets and metrics, intervene with changes or corrective actions, or justify your decisions with factual evidence for decision-making. Ultimately, whatever metric you choose should support corporate value optimization and, by extension, help execute strategy.

So let’s look at an example: how effective are BRMs at improving their business relationships? Are they building stronger relationships with key people? What does “stronger” even mean? Who are the “key” people? What are the principal characteristics we are looking for? Why do we need stronger relationships? How do strong relationships help the organization? The answers to these questions can help guide which measurements you choose.

In the BRMP course we discuss the Relationship Value Map, which is a tool to determine the quality of BRM relationships with key stakeholders. The Relationship Value Map also allows us to track relationship improvement changes over time, so that we can assess how far we have come, and where we still need to go. Although this can be a subjective measure, it will help us improve stronger relationships with key people. Understanding what a maestro should work on makes it possible to measure a maestro, despite the intangibility and ambiguity inherent in the BRM world.

I would like to leave you with this quote:

“We don’t know how to measure what we care about, so we care about what we measure.”
– Chris Dancy

When you’re next asked to measure the performance of your company’s BRM team, make sure you really understand what you are trying to measure, instead of just applying metrics assumed to be correct—remember that whatever measurement someone else is using does not automatically mean it has value for your team! Prepare your maestri to be successful in your organization. Measure your unique BRM capabilities in meaningful ways in order to help your team and its stakeholders perform in concert. After all, your success depends on it.

 

If you’re interested in setting your organization up for success and further understanding the topic of value measurement, check out our Value Management Workshop at BRMConnect in April 2016!