Thursday 13 August 2015

How committed are Business Relationship Managers?

After reading this article (http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20150810-what-do-boards-do-all-summer) on the board members commitments particularly over the summer holidays it got me thinking how committed should the BRM be?

I know ideally we are 100% committed to the role but in reality a nice work life balance goes a long way. Take now for example, I'm in Italy on a family vacation and I'm writing this while I wait for my turn in the shower before we get up and start the day. This is ok by my family because they are asleep or in the shower, however if I am emailing or blogging over breakfast I will be lambasted for working when I'm supposed to be on vacation. After all this is family fun time not work time.

Another section of the article mentions the Board Member reading work related articles on vacation, finding it a good time to read and not get interrupted with the daily work duties. This is another situation I can relate to as a BRM and before my vacation I loaded up my Ebook reader with both fiction and non fiction and it's the non fiction I've dipped in and out of making the odd note of how it relates to work.

But that's mainly my personal views and situation, when we look at the BRM role in its matured state it is long term and strategic and if implemented with all the supporting roles in place the business should be able to cope without a BRM for a week or two. In reality though when those major incidents and outages happen the business partners want that BRM interaction along with everything else happening to ensure they are getting the maximum levels of partnership to resolve them. The BRM is such a caring and compassionate role that we will often help out when needed on situations such as this. I mean we aren't exactly going to be pulling out our BRM theory book and quoting it during a major incident stating that we shouldn't be involved until a certain stage has been reached.

So to answer my own question, BRMs are extremely committed individuals in a role that often requires them to go above and beyond the theoretical expectations. Now I better get back to my vacation before my family notices :-)

Friday 7 August 2015

BRM competing with other providers?

Are Business Relationship Managers going to be moving into an ever competing market? At the minute you might be happily providing your business with its solutions ensuring they meet requirements and are working towards the strategic aims, but what happens when an outside provider offers the same? Some will have tight controls and restrictions in place meaning business units cannot purchase IT consultancy or cloud based systems without going through the BRM function first to ensure they are strategically aligned but others might not have that luxury, also the restrictions still don't stop the offers of consultancy and cloud services come flooding in each day. Some of these offers might be useful and add value and others might not, come of the potential value might be better delivered from elsewhere, so what do we do with these requests? It’s important to educate the business to pass these requests to the BRM function if they think they might be worth investigating. It’s also worth reiterating the common phrase I have to often tell my business partners and that is, work out your problem, processes and requirements fully before looking at solutions, you can adjust them after looking at the capabilities but if you get drawn in by something you can often try and make the problem fit the solution. Now while this is good advice there are always exceptions, the main one being technological innovations which offer an improvement not previously thought possible, this solution will then fix a problem we never knew we had.

So as BRMs you should take heed to all the consultants offering services and consultancy as they might have a value to add. The BRM role is especially tricky when you think about trying to acquire the knowledge of not only all of your provider capabilities but all of the external capabilities you could potentially buy in especially with all of the latest advances in your field of expertise.


So in summary don't fear or try and block outside competitors/consultants/sales people try and utilize them for added value and for expanding the capabilities of your function.