The Unflappable BRM

I was recently reminded of the importance of keeping a cool head during stressful situations  while reading articles about the new CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai. One story that went viral on the internet was the “cockroach story” he supposedly delivered at a recent speech. (I say supposedly as the story is at least four years old and he may not have even delivered it—you really can’t believe everything you read online—but regardless, the moral still holds true. Here is the story:

“At a restaurant, a cockroach suddenly flew out from somewhere and landed on a guest, who promptly  started screaming. The guest began jumping around and wringing both hands, desperately trying to get rid of the cockroach. Their reaction was contagious, as everyone in the group also began panicking. Finally, the guest managed to push the cockroach away, but unfortunately, it immediately landed on someone else in the group. Now, it was the next person’s turn to continue the drama.

The server rushed forward to their rescue, but in the flurry of movement, the cockroach next landed on the server’s shirt. However,  instead of panicking, the server stood firm and composed, and observed the behavior of the cockroach patiently. After a few still moments, the server was finally able to calmly pick it off and throw it out of the restaurant.

Sipping my coffee and watching the amusement, I began wondering, did the cockroach necessarily warrant the guests’ panicked behavior? If so, then why was the server able to handle the situation without any chaos?

I realized then that it is not the shouting of my father or my boss or my wife that disturbs me, but rather my inability to peacefully handle the disturbance caused by their shouting that further disturbs me. The traffic jams on the road don’t disturb me inherently, but rather my inability to handle the disturbance caused by the traffic jam that disturbs me.

More than the problem, it's my reaction to the problem that further creates chaos in my life.

Lessons learnt from the story:

I understood that in lieu of a knee-jerk reaction, I should instead respond. The guests in the restaurant reacted, whereas the server responded.

Reactions are instinctive, whereas responses take time to think about in order to save a situation from going awry, to prevent cracks in relationships, and to avoid making decisions while angry, anxious, stressed, or rushed.”  

This story shows how reactiveness can often cause increased panic, and exacerbate the situation rather than resolving it. On the other hand, a calm, measured response can bring value.

So how does this relate to the world of BRM? Well, although we would like to spend 100% of the time working strategically with our business partners, there will be times when a major incident occurs and our business partners and the provider will need us to help them through it. In these situations, the calm, unflappable BRM can play a key role by remaining calm and facilitating the cockroach’s removal from the restaurant. Adding value to a fraught situation is always appreciated, from both sides of the BRM role, so always try to remember to remain calm, gather the relevant information and respond accordingly or help facilitate the correct response.

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 :-)

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.

Complaints and Compliments for the BRM

The life of a Business Relationship Manager is never dull and you can often be apologizing for an unexpected service disruption one minute and then receiving praise for perfectly aligned service delivery the next. So what should be done with this praise and criticism? Should you print out your praise in extra-large font and display it on your wall for all to see, trying to shout your worth from the rooftops at the same time as possibly looking like the most narcissistic member of your organisation? Or should you carefully file them all away just in case you need them for your own business cases later down the line? 

Or alternatively you could accept them in the humblest way you deem possible and pass them on to key players who helped earn it. After all the best managers and leaders will protect their team and take responsibility for any mistakes at the same time they will give all praise for successes to the team. When you are a BRM the same is true but your team is the entire provider department, in my case IT Services. So I will apologies and take responsibility for any failings regardless of where they have originated and I will pass praise on to the members of staff that delivered that value. 

Selflessness really is an important virtue to have as a BRM however some will recognize the work you are doing as a BRM and recognize your selflessness and really appreciate it, that's when you can print it out and stick it on the wall. :-)

Is the CIO the ultimate BRM?

I have recently been reading The CIO Paradox by Matha Heller, it takes a really good look at the common struggles of the Chief Information Officer and it seemed remarkably similar to the common struggles of the Business Relationship Manager role. Which raised the question in my head, what are the differences between the CIO and BRM roles? A BRM role can be positioned at various levels within an organisational structure and if it is at the C level is it in fact a CIO or is a CIO a turbo charged super BRM?

Vaughan Merlyn has just been thinking along similar lines and has created this great table highlighting the differences:

Read his full post here: http://www.themerlyngroup.com/2015/07/21/are-we-entering-a-new-era-of-enterprise-it-leadership/

This highlights the role of the CIO as a broader overarching position with a greater responsibility especially over technology focused areas as well as the business focused areas. Currently the CIO role can be seen as career progression from the BRM role although you could argue that they could work side by side rather than BRM below the CIO it all depends on your organisational strategy and structure to support it. I would say though as the IT business moves more towards focusing on business value realization it’s more likely for the BRM role to rise up to the C level and co-exist rather than be replaced by the CIO.

So let the BRM's deliver the Business Value and the CIO's take responsibility for the enterprise technology, if they work well together you will have a highly successful strategic IT partnership delivering business value across the enterprise.

The changing challenges of the BRM journey from conception to mature function

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!

Business Relationship Management and the internal social network

Should the Business Relationship Manager play a pivotal role in the internal social network of an organisation? Recently there has been an upsurge of internal social network implementations within organisations with products such as Yammer, Tibbr and Jive. These tools help increase internal communication and engagement so should the BRM role be a part of this and if so how big a part?

As with any tool such as this, it is often not how feature rich the tool is but how aligned the implementation of the tool is to the requirements of the users which counts. A badly implemented tool will seem useless and unwieldy and as a result be met with resistance to adopt it, so it’s important to get the implementation to be as best fit to the organisational needs as possible. A lot has been said before about successful system implementations but I found this paper said it particularly well:

“scholars and practitioners recognize and appreciate many of the same issues integral to the success of system implementations. Practitioners, through the school of hard knocks and years of experiential analysis, have learned “what” seems to work and what doesn’t. Scholars, through years of academic study and research, can tell us “why.” By blending the whats and the whys, and tossing in a bit of common sense, we strengthen the guidelines for successful implementations” 

Paula Vaughan, System Implementation Success Factors; It’s not just the Technology 

So presuming a successful implementation has occurred then the BRM has the opportunity to exploit this tool and use it for their advantage. It can be used to engage more across the business, break down the walls of communication, remove those silos of information, to gather opinion and add weight to business cases or even as a collaborative tool within the BRM function. The increase in communication and transparency of work across projects can really help BRMs, remember the BRM function can have IT requirements as well. 

So just for one day take a look internally and think about tools which can help you as BRMs rather than what can help your business partners, ultimately everyone will benefit and more business value will be made.