New to BRM? The Essential Tips, Tricks, and Tools You Should Know
Starting a new BRM function in a company can be a daunting——yet exciting——prospect. If you’re a new BRM, the first question you may be asking yourself is, “Where do I even start?”
Know Why You’re Here
The first step is to agree upon your job description, which provides both you and those with whom you will be working certainty around your role and responsibilities. Make sure that the role is pitched at the right level to enable you to make a strategic difference.
Once you’ve agreed on this, you can prioritise your activities around where you will make quick wins. The most critical aspect to the success of a new BRM and function is for your colleagues among both your business function and business partners to understand the benefit your role has for them. Once you have their support, developing relationships and being included where you need to be will become much easier.
Mind the Gap
Next, identify the most critical gap in the organisation in which you can make a difference in a short amount of time. Maybe there’s no formal process of managing the demand pipeline, or a communication gap exists between your business function and the broader business—or there may be a part of the business wherein problems continually surface, which could be resolved by your business function’s involvement.
Demonstrating that you understand and can provide solutions to your business partners’ problems early on will help gain the acceptance of people with whom you seek to develop relationships.
Be Relevant
Your function is new, so your business partners and business function colleagues may have reservations about this new role in their landscape. Your business partners may feel that you’re just another layer of bureaucracy to overcome to get to the services they need, your business function colleagues may feel like you’re stepping into their space, or—even worse—that you’re going to create additional work for them when they’re already feeling overstretched.
Above all else, avoid death by Powerpoint. Using prepared presentations can often result in you providing the same message to different audiences, yet engaging none. Instead, tailor your pitch to each group, demonstrating how your involvement will make their lives easier. Use the wins you’ve already achieved to show the value you can bring. By highlighting the challenges you know they face, you can show how you and your business function can help to overcome them.
Forge Alliances
These alliances ensure that your business function isn’t blindsided by initiatives at the last minute, which presents an opportunity to form strategic partnerships through the ability to propose solutions to business needs as they arise.
By highlighting the challenges you know they face, you can show how you and your business function can help to overcome them.
Each organisation may have different functions that contribute to your business function and partner’s success alike; identifying and forging alliances with them is important.
Build on the Foundation
Once you’ve gained acceptance within your business, you will then have the foundation from which to expand your competencies and mature the relationship and offerings to your business partners—which puts you in a great place to work towards strategic partnership.
Michelle Weipers is a Chartered Company Secretary with 20 years of experience in the offshore financial services industry with Maitland, which operates from 15 offices worldwide and has over USD280bn assets under administration. Her interest in problem-solving with the use of technology soon branded her as the “office techie,” which spurred her move into a new role focussed on systems usage and process design. Several company restructures later, Michelle was officially moved into ICT with an initial focus on demand management, and she was recently appointed to head the global ICT Business Partner team and tasked with the responsibility of developing a full BRM offering. In addition to her chartered secretary qualification (ACIS), she has an MBA and MSc in Strategic Planning, both attained from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland.
