SWOTs: A Strategic BRM’s Go-To Tool
Are you on the path to becoming a strategic partner? Start with SWOT.
As President and CEO of Business Relationship Management Institute (BRM Institute), a large portion of my days are filled interacting with Business Relationship Managers (BRMs) from around the globe, helping them develop and achieve greater professional and organizational results. During these interactions, there are often the same questions over and over from BRM to BRM.
“What is something I can do to add value to my business partner and begin the journey to a converged strategic business partner?”
As knowledge-sharing is my passion, I’ve decided to provide my answers to these questions through public articles—beginning with the infamous question, “What is something I can do to add value to my business partner and begin the journey to a converged strategic business partner?”
There are many paths to becoming a strategic business partner, as detailed in the BRM Institute’s online BRMiBOK. One additional tool to leverage is identifying business unit strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT). Here is a recent question I received, in which the use of SWOTs was the ideal solution:
BRM Institute member: “Part of my role is to mature IT and move the relationship to Level Five, Strategic Business Partner of the BRM Maturity Model. I’ve only just started in this role, and I’m struggling to find ways to add value to my business partner. What is something I can do?”
Considering the fact that this member had only just started in their role and completed the initial business partner meetings, the first suggestion that came to mind was a business function and value stream SWOT. SWOT exercises force BRMs to think strategically and potentially bring new ideas to the table.
In this article, I detail how a BRM routinely performs a SWOT to drive business value to business partners. The result? Continued business agility and business value results.
The key to a successful SWOT is to make the effort both continuous and iterative. SWOTs are not one-and-done. The business landscape is always changing, and as a result of this constant change, BRMs are encouraged to learn by doing and continuously monitoring the business environment and challenging business strategy. This is done by routinely compiling and analyzing previous SWOTs against business results, learning from the results, and re-SWOT-ing based on previous SWOTs and the changing business environment.
“SWOTs are not one-and-done. The business landscape is always changing, and as a result of this constant change, BRMs are encouraged to learn by doing and continuously monitoring the business environment.”
Step 1: Find your inner SWOT.
- If you are not familiar with a SWOT, search the internet to find hundreds of different approaches—feel free to pick your favorite.
Step 2: Let the SWOT begin!
- Perform the SWOT on your own, without your business partner’s input (we’ll involve them later).
- Be aware that you are not SWOT-ing your business partner or their team. The last thing you want to do is point out your partner’s deficiencies if you’re trying to build trust at this early stage of the relationship. We’ll save deficiencies for a later post.
- Leverage your partner’s peers to give you usable knowledge through informal interview questions (e.g. what is working, what is not, etc.). No need to tell your partner’s peers what you’re doing exactly—just have an informal conversation and tell them you’re just educating yourself in the business area.
- Leverage your end customers by meeting with them and asking them what’s working, what’s not, and what’s missing that could be added.
- Use the Internet to research the business function. See what SWOT information you can find there.
- Build your SWOT.
Step 3: Practice and improve your SWOT.
- Leverage your boss (CxO or BRM Team Lead) and identify three to five BRM peers who interact with your SWOT-ed business function or value stream. To ensure valuable feedback, be sure to secure BRMs who care and have a vested interest in your success.
- Present your findings to the team identified in Step 1, asking them for direct feedback on both your SWOT and your presentation of the results.
- Leverage this feedback to make your SWOT even stronger.
Step 4: Present your SWOT to your business partner.
- Now it’s time to present the results to your business partner. Present this meeting in a non-threatening way to your business partner—this is the moment you want to shine, not tear down the relationship. You can casually say, “In an effort to learn more about our business area, I performed a SWOT. The results are great and I learned so much. Would you like to go through the results I documented?” I’ve never had a business partner say no when presented in this fashion.
- Present the results to your partner.
- Prepare for the partner’s reaction. In my experience, the business partner always reacts in a very positive way. You will hear things like, “Wow, I never considering doing that before!” or “Can I take this and show my VP?”
- Take the time to discuss the SWOT in detail, based on the reactions and engagement of your business partner.
Step 5: Wash, rinse, repeat.
- Leverage the results and improve your business partner’s three-to-five-year strategic plan. For example, there could be new opportunities or threats that must now be accounted for in the strategy.
- Inform your business partner that you plan to redo the SWOT continuously to help you stay current and ahead of competitors. Strategy must always be reviewed against the current business landscape and continuously adjusted to stay ahead of the constant business change.
- In the continued review cycle, be sure to prepare reviews of previous SWOTs against actual results. Much can be learned from previous SWOTs, as they can be used to help reset the business strategy going forward.
By getting teams thinking strategically, I’ve seen SWOT efforts completely change the game within organizations. The practice of looking into business strategy against the current landscape can lead to great ideas, awareness of threats, and improved motivation by acknowledging what is working well through the strengths portion of the exercise.
As a BRM, the SWOT can go a long way towards the growth and development of your role. Get ready to ensure business value results and move yourself and your organization up the maturity model to converged strategic business partnership!
Aaron Barnes is an expert BRM leader and practitioner with first-hand experience in successfully performing as a strategic business partner, BRM team leader, and instiller of leading BRM practices in organizations. Often referred to as the “spiritual godfather of BRM,” Aaron’s passion for business partnering comes from his years of consulting service in the U.S. and Europe, where he led converged business teams, designed strategy, and implemented business systems with a constant focus on delivering business value results. Aaron co-founded and is the CEO of Business Relationship Management Institute and has spent countless hours demonstrating the value of Business Relationship Management to practitioners and organizations to advance the BRM profession around the globe.
Hello fellow BRMs,
Is there any guidance available as to what should appear as standard in a terms of reference (ToR) for sharing with your business partners?
Thank-you,
Chris
Hello Chris,
When I have done these, the ToR often varied by business area or industry that I was working in. As we were always moving fast, we focused on informal approachs to this and less is more, keeping this simple. Busines case development would do much more formal writeups and deeper research once an idea was proved to move beyond the intial phases of Ideation.
As soon as it got complicated with page after page of content, no one would take the time to look at it in these early stages. I found it effective to simply list where/how information was captured at a very high level, this allowed for discussion as necessary.
If you need a more formal approach, here is a great guide: http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EXTEVACAPDEV/Resources/ecd_writing_TORs.pdf