The move from a customer account manager to a mature
strategically aligned Business Relationship Manager is long journey, even
longer if you don't have a customer account manager role as a starting point. Along
that journey many different challenges will be faced but they tend to be
similar and come in a similar order despite the sector your organisation sits
in.
Below are 6 steps in the journey and common issues with
advice to help resolve them I have experienced from talking with other Business
Relationship Managers around the globe through the
Business Relationship Management Institute.
1)
Setting
up the BRM function
The key to overcoming the first challenge of setting up the
BRM function is gaining internal buy in.
To do this you need to be able to
answer the following questions from your internal provider group:
What are you going to do for us
internal providers? Will you bring back more work, I’m already overloaded? Can
I stop talking to customers now and put everything through you?
This role may be all well and good for the business partner
groups (customers) but what about the internal provider group (IT Services in
my case). You need to sell the ideology of the function highlighting the
benefits to them. This isn’t a case of just listing the benefits from
literature and best practice but finding the real suffering points internally
and showing how BRM will help reduced these. In my case it was the fact that
all too often partner groups would purchase IT solutions to problems and start
to implement them without consulting IT Services first as they thought it would
all just work and they didn't need to bother us with an external system, cloud
services sales people have a lot to answer for! Invariably further down the
line they require help with integration, migration of data or support which
caused a real headache for IT Services as they had little or no knowledge of
the system. Sometimes we would find two or more identical systems as well, so
the big selling point for BRM internally was that it would stop or at least
reduce this, it would capture the requirements early and deliver the right
solution with the correct people involved from the start.
However you will also need to manage expectations and
clearly outline what the function isn’t there to do, for example the BRM’s can
be an escalation point but not for everything. “I’ve emailed them but they haven’t
responded can you give them a call?” As much as some people hate picking up the
phone the BRM role isn’t the only role to talk to people external to the provider
group, technical people need some soft skills as well.
2)
Starting
the BRM function
The key to overcoming the second challenge of setting up the
BRM function is gaining external buy in. To do this you need to be able to
answer the following questions from your internal provider group:
How will you be delivering
value? How is this not a gate keeper? Will this role get things done? Can I use
you as an escalation point? Can you help with our planning?
Again try not to repeat text book responses and think about
how the role will help each partner group, how can you deliver value? Can you
streamline processes, input expertise to increase accuracy of deliverables,
help improve reputation, remember value isn’t all about money! It’s also important
to highlight that the role isn’t a gate keeper, you might want all requests to
be known to you but they don't all necessarily have to go through you for
approval, the worst thing for the partner is to see you as a hoop to jump
through or even worse a wall that blocks requests. Planning is key and although
strategic planning may be hard to get involved with at first it’s important to
offer the service and highlight the importance and benefits. If necessary start
with the short term plans and work up to the longer term strategic planning.
3)
Proving
the BRM function works
The third challenge happens after the function has been
setup, this challenge is proving the worth of the BRM, preferably without over
stating it. Questions asked at this stage tend to be:
How have you saved
money, time or effort for the organisation? Or have you delivered value through
other means, such as improving the reputation of the organisation externally.
Initially it’s best to get some quick wins in early to show
that the function is effective, then try to work on the more business critical
issues which have the biggest impact and deliver the more important business
value. These can be hard to quantify and there may be conflicting ideas on the
more important issues which need to be tackled but let the business decide,
after all they are the experts in business value, and then take that decision
and ensure the work is completed. Once you have a good few success stories
under your belt it’s always good to produce a simple one page report outlining
the value the function has delivered for those who are interested.
Also it’s important to learn from your mistakes and let
people know how you have learnt from them, do not try and brush them under the
carpet and cover them up, everyone makes
mistakes the important part is how well you recover from them and ensure they
are unlikely to happen again.
4)
Expanding
the BRM function
Once you have proved the worth of the function you will be
well positioned to expand into any areas not currently covered. This means
breaking down those last pockets of resistance who might still ague the facts
of the worth you have collected, so depending on office politics you may need
your argument to be watertight! Potential difficult responses could be:
This may work for
them but we don’t want to use it for our area, our business area will work
better without you.
The answer to these issues is going to be very specific for
each situation but there will always be a number of options available to
explore, even if the option is to leave one part of the business and focus on
delivering value to the other parts, eventually someone will notice and push
for your role to be expanded. Mostly though once the process is set up and
mature, value is being delivered and you have learnt from your mistakes and
mitigated the risks of them re-occurring, business units will want to work with
you even if it is in a limited capacity at first. Don't try and force your way
in and push your processes on people they have to want to adopt them to gain
the benefits you have proven to deliver elsewhere.
5)
Growing
the BRM function
Then once you taken over the world, or at least setup a
large and varied network of provider and partner relationships which are
working together coherently and delivering tangible measurable value to the
organisation you can make a case for more staff to improve grow and deliver
even more.
What will you do with
more staff? What have you not delivered?
As you work you will find gaps which will need filling and
you won’t be able to fill them all so you will be looking at the high value
gaps as mentioned before, but with more staff and a larger function you could
be delivering on all the smaller gaps which all add up to more business value.
6)
Maintaining
success of the BRM function
Lastly don't rest on your laurels, don't get complacent,
continue to strive for improvements, monitor tweak and adjust. There is always
room for improvement and there is always more to learn, both internally within
your organisation and externally through new innovative capabilities and also
through developments within the BRM industry. Of course the best place to stay
up to date with BRM developments is the
BRMI web site so make sure you are
registered and get involved!
