The Game Plan: Strategic BRMs Focusing on Optimizing Value

As BRMs we often spend most of our time looking at our business units game plans, their long term strategies to achieving success, but we don't often look at our own. Now some might argue that if we make our business succeed then we ourselves have succeeded, and yes that is true, however if we can have our own game plan to optimize that success then the value could be maximized in that win for the organization for both the BRM and the business unit, a true win win!

So what should a BRM game plan look like? Well like all complex and interesting things, it depends, it depends on the maturity, the internal politics and a myriad of other factors. So how should it be approached? Well that is simple, like all things BRM it should be approached with value in the forefront of the mind, specifically measuring anticipated value and planning to maximize it without depreciating any value being gained elsewhere within the organization, actually not as simple as I might have first stated, lets break it down into four steps:

1) Finding potential value
2) Measuring expected value
3) Maximizing delivered value
4) Checking for value disruption

So step one was finding the potential value, this is key and like any hunter stalking their prey, to find it you have to understand it. I don't just mean reading up on a business units strategy or knowing what their top aims are for the coming years but really understanding them, get embedded in the business, know how they work and learn about the complex and interesting factors that build up the unwritten rules of how they plan, operate and improve. Once you really understand the business and the people operating within it you will learn the most effective ways the value can be realized. There is no point pushing for a strategic value chain to be focused on when you know the people needed to implement it don't believe in it and are planning on campaigning for a change in direction for it.

Step two is measuring the expected value, this involves looking at the value from multiple angles to see who is going to be gaining and where. It’s not all about the money, reputational gains, risk reduction, trust building or simply laying the foundations for longer term future strategy may all be elements of value to be gained. Build up some KPIs for the relevant stakeholders to agree on, then once agreed move onto step three.

Step three is about maximizing that value, so looking for potential value leakage and minimizing it, looking for the big value gains to push more resources towards. Can you now improve on the KPIs set in step two? Or ensure they are met with minimal risk?

Step four is one often forgot about but as a BRM you always need to look at the bigger picture, producing value for one business unit within a large organization can sometimes have a detrimental effect on another business unit. To mitigate this risk, ensure the correct levels of governance and control have been involved and are aware of any potential knock on effects. Keep them up to date with high level reports of progress as things change, a long term project may be fine one month but the next could have a big impact.

In conclusion, every organization is different and it’s impossible to define a game plan that will work for everyone but I hope to have made you think and given you an idea to help you deliver some value and improve your BRM game.

There is no such thing as an IT Strategy!

Business strategy is the only strategy, that's right there is no IT strategy, that IT strategy document you've been working on for months is worthless and here’s why.

The IT strategy is a supporting strategy to support the overarching business strategy, yes this is true but does it have any worth? Now we all know it’s hard to get anyone to read a long winded strategy, so often these supporting strategies come in two forms the long one and the one sider overview. I’m going to argue both are pointless, although I’m willing to be proven wrong as I have been a big fan of them in the past and could just be having an off day.

Lets take the one sider first, that's got to be useful hasn't it? Ok lets take it to the senior business leaders who are in charge of the organisational strategy first, they have their strategy saying they want to be doing X and Y to get to point Z in the next 5 years. Now we take the IT one side strategic overview saying we will help their strategy by doing A and B so we are at point C. Now if the business leaders have no faith in IT and IT have failed to deliver in the past they may take an interest in the details of this but ultimately they have told you to support X and Y and to come with them to point Z, so just get on with it the best way you can, that's what they pay you for. If anything is happening that results in going off track then tell us.

Ok so the top level isn’t interested what about the people working towards the strategy within IT? They need to align their services and projects with the IT strategy right? Wrong. They need to be thinking about the business strategy and not getting bogged down in this supporting strategy that will most likely be out of date by the time they read it, they need to understand from a high level where the organisation is going and adjust accordingly. Yes, I suppose the IT strategy could be seen as a tool to enable staff to better understand this by providing them a stepping stone they can relate to, but this runs the risk of them using this tool as a final strategy and not looking beyond to what is really needed.

So what about the long strategy the one no one reads, well that is often used for one purpose and that is to justify projects. We are doing this project because it works towards the strategic aim 3.78b in the IT strategy, no you are not, you are doing the project because you want to, you like the technology, you want to work with that team of people again, there is another true reason and you are using the strategy to justify it. This happens all too much in my experience and without an IT strategy this would not be possible, projects would have to relate to the true business strategy.

So all of that might sound like someone who has gotten out of bed the wrong side this morning and it is all a bit one sided but hopefully it will make you think and start a debate around what strategies are needed and why. 

Measure Your BRM to Change Your BRM

Now, no one really wants to blow their own trumpet, peacock feathers splayed, and go strutting up and down the workplace shouting about how great they are. However, sometimes this behaviour is necessary to measure your effectiveness and how well your function is performing—although you may want to keep the peacock feathers to a minimum!

The reasons for this can be easily categorised into the familiar Run, Grow, and Transform framework:

• Run – Firstly, it may be a requirement from your organisation to justify your existence, so to survive and run the BRM function you may need to measure your effectiveness and report back to your superiors proving your function is still a valuable asset.
• Grow – This is to bid for additional resources to be applied to your function; in the case of BRM this is almost always additional staff resources. Generally because of the great successes and huge benefits the function brings, but that doesn’t mean you don’t need to prove it from time to time.
• Transform – Lastly, you may want to measure your effectiveness to help transform the function to focus on either new areas or shift some resources onto a particular area. This may be due to a change in strategy from the organisation, or because there is a particular piece of value that has been identified. Either way, this could highlight both the additional value in another direction, or a loss of value in an area you need to move away from.

So now that you have a good understanding of why you want to measure your effectiveness, how do you start?

There are a number of quantitative and qualitative measures that could be focused upon, and this number will vary hugely between organisations. Quantitative measures could be high-level figures, such as the number of projects delivered in a particular strategic area or the value delivered to a particular business unit over a period of time. You could also focus on the value beyond the internal business, such as a measure on customer experience feedback into the organisation. The qualitative areas are harder to measure in an objective and unbiased way; often, multiple viewpoints need to be gathered to investigate low scores and any differences.

Lastly, take particular care when selecting the criteria for measuring the effectiveness of your BRM function, as it not only has to hold true and be relevant now, it also needs to maintain that level of relevance for years to come. Otherwise, when you analyse your year-on-year trends, you may find that you no longer have the data you need to help you Run, Grow, or Transform your BRM function into the direction you desire—and this data is the critical first step to being able to measure effectiveness. After all, before you make a change, you need to know exactly where you’re coming from.

Internal Focus: Building Relationships with BRMs and Peers

As BRMs, we should be experts in building relationships, but since no two relationships are the same, no one technique for building and improving them will work across the board. That said, I am always open to advice and guidance on any new skills or approaches I could use that could help me, so in thinking of others who may feel similarly, I thought I should share some of the tips I have received recently.

The first tip that was brought to my attention recently is that while we often think of technology bringing us closer together, it turns out that it can actually be a relationship killer, whereas face-to-face engagement can be a much stronger way of building relationships. While I’m still not sure that I entirely agree, it did make me think critically about my patterns of communication and human interaction. As BRMs, we should try not to hide behind a screen pinging emails back and forth, and instead get out of our offices and meet face-to-face. The reason for this is that so much is told via body language, which makes interactions flow and work progress.

When a BRM meets face-to-face with a business partner, they normally have one thing at the forefront of their mind: value. As much as the focus should be on value delivery, however, there are often some more subtle things to think about. Examples of these things can be as simple as eye contact, smiling, having an upright posture, and displaying curiosity leading to a connection based on a common interest. Even a smooth, fluid handshake has been proven to offer a greater connection than a jerky, rigid one. Other research suggests that people are more likely to be open to agreeing and being influenced after they have eaten and are sitting on a comfortable surface, so those post-lunch meetings should theoretically be much more successful than the ones just before lunch. However, it’s important not to force these subtle engagement changes—obviously, it’s not the best idea to hug someone you've never met whilst smiling in their face and offering them a sandwich to eat and a beanbag to sit on!

Once you’ve considered these social interactions, you need to think about the content of your engagements, beginning with a clear agenda that benefits each member of the meeting. After all, if someone isn’t benefiting from the meeting, then why are they there? It’s important to be transparent and inclusive about the intention of the meeting, let the relevant people in the meeting have their say, and prompt those who haven’t spoken for their opinion.

Beyond conversational engagement, the single most important part of relationship building is attentive listening. A BRM is not there to sell to the provider, but to listen and see how they can shape the provider to their business partner’s needs. Therefore, it’s critical to find out what is important to the provider, what drives them forward, and what they are working towards in both the short and long term, in order to have a successful relationship. All of this ties back to maintaining a level of curiosity that leads to finding a common interest or issue that can be worked on.

By building up from a sound social interaction base, to a clear and inclusive engagement, up to value delivery, a successful relationship will form—and more importantly, persist long after that initial interaction.

Challenging Changes: Organisational Cultures and How to Handle Them

While change can be both tricky and expensive within organisations, it’s also necessary in order for the organisation to innovate and adapt to the world around it. Needless to say, however, the implementation of a new BRM capability can be challenging if the culture within the organisation is prohibitive.

The actual implementation of a BRM capability is essentially a business process change, which is achieved by business process re-engineering (BPR). BPR is about being innovative and thinking ‘outside of the box.’ As Archer and Bowker put it, BPR is “a vision-led structured methodology for the fundamental rebuilding of business process through the balanced interaction of work tasks, people, information, and technology.” To re-engineer a business process is to completely rethink the way it works from beginning to end, questioning everything from the perspectives of both the customer and internal efficiency.

BPR is likely to entail not just the reorganisation of roles and responsibilities, but also some fundamental changes in the organisational culture. When faced with this challenge, it is important to first identify your organisational culture, which is often heavily influenced by the managerial cultures and are commonly categorised into the sections below:

Autocratic power culture – Led by management, wherein an autocratic leader can be charismatic and well-respected.

Bureaucratic role culture – Formal and centralised, wherein everyone’s roles are clearly defined and relationships are also clearly set out. However, there are often informal relationships and roles that people exploit to get things done quicker and easier, rather than using the formal channels. This can be particularly important in areas of organisations that have a specific technological expertise.

Matrix task-based culture – Tasks are devolved to the lowest practical level in a project management style.

Anarchic individualistic culture – Informal and decentralised, in which everybody has a say in all decisions.

Whatever your organisational culture, it needs an appropriate approach to ensure success—and this may mean changing the culture completely. Davenport and Short^[2] summarise the culture on which successful business change must rest, expressing that organisational culture must move from:

• Hierarchies to teams
• Controlling to empowering
• Analysis to action
• Risk aversion to calculated risk taking
• Boundaries to networks

Commitment to change

Once you’ve determined your organizational culture, the next step is to build commitment to the change you are trying to implement—in this case, a new BRM capability. Yeates and Cadle^[3] state that in order to get all staff to commit to the organisation’s mission statement—and to make the pursuit of improvement a core feature of the organisation’s culture— organisations must be willing to spend the money to adopt a distinctive managerial style. The two key goals they identify are:

• The removal of hierarchical differentiators, with the same privileges for management and staff alike. This also fits into Robertson’s current style of thinking, Holacracy.^[4]
• The application of resources, such as quality improvement teams to identify and solve quality problems. A BRM team could fill this role!

Widespread organisational commitment is integral to the success of the new BRM capability, as it sets the stage for C-level buy-in. Hammer & Champy detail some further benefits, including the organization’s transformation into becoming processed and culture-focused, which helps to empower the right people in the right way, improve understanding, and focus on value delivery.

Common obstacles

Of course, it’s unlikely that such a tremendous business reorientation would be accepted without a fuss in most organisations. Some common obstacles to change I have encountered are people’s inherent fear of change, an inability to see the potential benefits of the change, pockets of resistance from some stakeholders, general confusion about the scope of the change, lack of commitment to the change, and unrealistic timelines for people to see the benefits of the change.

Without a patient and thoughtful CIO at the helm, all of these obstacles could very well be the downfall of the new BRM capability within the organisation. The support of C-level management is critical in these instances, as well as a strong organisational understanding of the BRM capability and its benefits.

Climbing the ladder of support

Jobber^[5] offers a useful typology termed the “ladder of support,” which identifies the different stages of acceptance displayed by those affected by the change:

• Opposition – When employees are openly against the change, and use direct and forceful methods to try and stop it
• Resistance - When employees show their displeasure about the change less openly, and more passive-aggressive in tactics to delay or stop it
• Compliance - Employees will act in accordance to the change, but still believe that it is not the best option, so they do so with minimal effort
• Acceptance - There is a high level of support, and employees realise the benefits of the change and will work towards the change
• Commitment - Employees are committed to the change, fully believe in it, and work towards it with conviction and enthusiasm

It is important to note that this is not a simple hierarchical chain—people can start anywhere on the ladder and move in either direction. Therefore, it’s important to find out where key stakeholders are on the ladder and help move them in the right direction.

Conclusion

When implementing a new BRM capability, it is absolutely critical to analyse your organisational culture before setting any other steps in motion. Ask yourself, What managerial styles are in place in my organisation? Do they differ throughout different business functions within the organisation, or do they shift as I move up and down the hierarchy? What is a tried-and-true method to approaching change with these groups? Which methods of resistance could I potentially run into?

In order to ensure that the BRM capability thrives within the organisation, you must be prepared with answers to all of these questions—and then some. Can you think of some other questions you’ll need to answer before beginning this journey?

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[1] Archer, Richard and Bowker, Pauk. (1995), “BPR consulting: an evaluation of the methods employed”, Business Process Re-engineering & Management Journal, Vol. 1 No. 2, pp. 28-46.

[2] Davenport, T H and Short, J E. (1990), “The new industrial engineering: information technology and business process redesign”, Sloan Management Review, Summer, pp. 11 - 27

[3] Yeats, D and Cadle, J. (1996),”Project Management for Information Systems”, Pitman publishing.

[4] Robertson, Brian J. (2015),” Holacracy: The Revolutionary Management System that Abolishes Hierarchy”, Portfolio Penguin

[5] Jobber, D. (2001), “Principles and Practice of Marketing”, McGraw Hill, 2^nd edition.