Twice the Business Value in Half the Time: When Agile Methods Meet the Business Relationship Management Role

By Vaughan Merlyn and Aaron Monroe

Vaughan is a co-founder of Business Relationship Management Institute and Principal with The Merlyn Group.

Aaron is a Corporate Vice President – Strategy, Research, and Governance, New York Life Insurance Company.

The age-old pursuit of Business-IT alignment is ultimately about delivering business value through investments in information and Information Technology capabilities and services. A key aspect of value realization is the investments in principles, practices and relationships that lead to enhanced partnerships between corporate IT organizations and the business units they serve.

New Roles and Frameworks Emerge

To this end, two relatively new movements are gaining traction and are starting to converge. One such movement is the establishment of the Business Relationship Manager role and capability, created to close the chasm that often separates IT organizations from the businesses they serve. The other is Agile, a framework and process with variations such as Lean, Scrum, XP and Scaled, created to accelerate business value delivery, improve predictability, better manage scope and reduce waste.

The implications of this convergence between a bridging role and value-accelerating frameworks are profound and central to the larger Business-IT convergence taking place as a result of several factors prevailing today:

• Commoditization of IT Services (e.g., globally sourced Help Desk and PC provisioning)
• Changing workplace demographics (e.g., technology-literate workers and executives)
• Consumerization of IT (e.g., mobile computing, Software as a Service)
• Business appetite for increased innovation (e.g., new products, services and business models)
• IT leaders working to ‘rise above’ the traditional operational and productivity-enabling purposes behind IT investments (e.g., CIO becomes Chief Innovation Officer)

Roots of Business Relationship Management

The discipline of Business Relationship Management evolved from earlier IT organizational change efforts that introduced the Account Manager role and Service Management discipline. These interventions were intended to help business executives navigate seemingly complex IT organizations and improve service delivery. Account Managers simplified the process of ‘placing an order’ for an IT service or assistance and helped shape IT services.

Today, with improved Service Management disciplines in place, the Account Manager role is evolving into a Business Relationship Management role, as it migrates up through the value chain from underlying infrastructure and Service Management to a focus on the business customer and realized business value. With this shift, the BRM is engaging earlier their business partner’s strategic decision cycle by getting closer to (and often embedded in) the business. BRMs add real, tangible value by helping stimulate and shape business demand for IT and ensure business value is realized from IT solutions.

Roots of Agile

The roots of Agile go back long before the widely known Agile Manifesto written in 2001. The New New Product Development Game, by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka, published in the Harvard Business Review in 1986, outlines the “Rugby” approach, also known as Scrum. Agile methods that incorporate Scrum are now commonplace in software development environments.

The challenge in the last few years has been to apply Agile methods at scale within corporate IT organizations. In these environments, it is critical to have people able to bridge the gap and ensure the Business-IT partnership is robust and effective. Agile methods define Product Manager and Product Owner roles, designed to bridge the gap. In many organizations, Business Relationship Managers are tapped to play those roles and to ensure that targeted business value is clearly defined and appropriately realized through increments of deployment.

Learn More About Scaled Agile and the BRM

Aaron Monroe has extensive experience as both a BRM and with Scaled Agile methods, and will be leading an interactive learning session at BRMConnect™ 2015, the world’s very first and highly anticipated conference for BRMs is to be held on May 26-28, 2015, in Portland, OR.