The role of the Council at BRMI conferences

Below is a copy of my article for the BRMI newsletter, the original article can be found here.

Welcome to this edition of the BRM Council Corner! This month, we will discuss the role of the Council at BRMI conferences. There has been only one conference to date, but what a conference it was! To see just how amazing it was click here.

BRMConnect 2015 was held in Portland, Oregon, and the Council was honored to perform the role of owner and facilitator at the conference. Our responsibilities included helping to welcome the delegates to the venue, putting them at ease, and answering any questions that arose. Additionally, we managed breakout groups to evoke participation and creativity, which was particularly rewarding when we solved some key issues people were facing in their work. Most importantly, however, it was a pleasure to join in and ensure that everyone was having fun and getting as much BRM value as possible.

This was a highly rewarding role for the Council, between our assistance with bringing everything together to seeing the value transferred from the conference delivery to the delegates. One session I particularly enjoyed was the simulation in which we put the theory and advice into action in a simulated, “real-life” situation. This was kept light-hearted and fun, while also highlighting the issues and techniques needed to overcome them in an organizational environment—the beer and pizza provided was the icing on the cake.

In 2016, we now have the exciting prospect of not one, but four BRMConnect conferences spread throughout the year and across the globe—so despite four times the work, there will also be four times the reward (and of course, four times the fun!). This year, the Council members are thrilled to have the opportunity to take on more responsibilities within the conferences by becoming more involved in the planning stages, as well as the ownership and facilitation of the conferences.
Among these increased responsibilities, members of the Council will be able to join planning groups in charge of tasks such as helping to choose venues, working out logistics, and finding local events that can complement the conference. Members will also now be able to review the conference content and decide what information may be more relevant in specific parts of the world. For example, I’m working on the BRMConnect conference in Amsterdam, and I know that within Europe, BRMs are twice as likely to use service management techniques than in the United States. Therefore, conference attendees will benefit greatly from a session highlighting where service management ends and business relationship management continues, in order to add extra value to location-specific BRMs. It’s exciting to be able to use my professional knowledge and experience to impact BRMs positively across the world!

Although BRMConnect is still in its infancy—being a mere one year old—the resounding success of the inaugural conference shows great promise for 2016 and beyond. With the continuous evolution and improvement of BRMI, it truly is an exciting time for the BRM Council to be involved! Be sure to register for one of the four conferences now!

BRM facilitating innovation

The BRM is fundamental to business convergence, helping to bring together business operations and business functions at a strategic level. Leading organizations are now eliminating the service silos of yesterday, empowering business functions such as IT, HR, finance and the other departments to share accountability for strategy and business value through a teamed approach to value realization.

We know that the business innovates by changing business processes, expanding into new markets, creating new products, and exploiting changes to the macro-environment. On other hand, we are also aware that the business functions drive innovation as well, particularly through the expansion of capabilities and potential offerings. This is especially true of the IT sector, where the recent explosion of cloud-based IT services makes innovative capabilities newly available every day.

So how exactly does the BRM help facilitate the convergence of the business operation and function to produce innovative value creation?

For one thing, the BRM must keep up-to-date with the industry’s latest capabilities, as well as those within the business operational and functional capabilities. This way, the BRM will be aware of all the possibilities available to support the business’ ever-evolving needs. Ideally, this responsibility should be formalized in the BRM job description, as well as in other key roles.

Google used to encourage employees to spend 20% of their time on their own innovative ideas to add value to the company, which resulted in some fantastic services—and many failed ideas. Now, the company focuses on taking a more measured approach, encouraging innovation through a more top-down system in which specific areas or problems must be solved in innovative ways. In your organization, you may have some dedicated groups working in a similar model to Google, or you may even have innovative internal roles like that of the  Cloud Services Manager, whose responsibility it is to look at emerging cloud offerings and how they could be integrated within existing systems to bring added capabilities and value to the organization. If you’re really lucky, you may even have a Futurologist (coolest job title ever!) who is dedicated to looking beyond the current internal and external capabilities and instead foreseeing what is likely to be available in the future. With this role in your organization, you could plan to innovate and get even further ahead of the innovation curve.

However it works within your organization—and whatever functional area the BRM is in—the role of the BRM is key to merging not only the business operations and functions, but also their respective innovations, in order to ensure that they move together as a strategic partnership. Your BRM may not have a crystal ball, but you can certainly try and glimpse into a future of realized value—and then try and steer the convergence towards it.

Business Relationship Manager Sample Interview Questions

In the past I have had been the interviewee and the interviewer for the role of a Business Relationship Manager, I have also helped other in preparing for interview which they have said has been a great help, so below are some questions to help out anyone else.

There are the obvious standard interview questions you need to prepare for like the following:

1)    What made you apply for this role?

2)    Where do you see yourself in five years’ time?

3)    Why should we employ you?

But what about specific Business Relationship Manager role questions? These are the real important ones and will be a test of your BRM skills, below are a selection of ones I have encountered:

1)    Describe a time you delivered a large amount of measurable value to the business.

2)    Give an example of when you have had to deliver a solution to meet conflicting stakeholder requirements.

3)    How do you prioritize one business units requests over another which require the same internal provider resource?

4)    At what level do you see as the best fit for the Business Relationship Manager function within an organisation?

5)    What tasks would you see fall outside of the remit of the Business Relationship Manager role?

6)    How would you help implement a new service or a large change to an existing service which has been introduced from within the provider?

7)    What situation would you find where you would have to say ‘No’ to an important stakeholder?

8)    How would you keep up to date with internal and external capabilities to ensure the business had access to the most suitable solutions?

9)    How do you see the Business Relationship Manager function expanding and maturing to meet growing needs?

10)  If the provider and the business have a difference of opinions how would you help resolve the issue?

11) Give an example of when you have had to communicate complex technical information to senior non-technical people.

12) Give an example of a strategic plan you have set and implemented to deliver long term value.

13) Describe how you would approach a senior leader within the organisation compared with similar request from a lower level manager.

14) Give an example of how you have worked with diverse business cultures from different business units.

15) How will you continue to develop yourself as a Business Relationship Manager?

I find preparing answers to all the above and more means I go into the interview confident and ready for 90% of what will be thrown at me. You will still get the odd curve ball but that's fine, just take your time and if you don't know be honest and say you will have to get back to them later.

Also remember to have questions to ask your interviewer at the end, it shows you have thought hard about the opportunity and it also gives you a chance to interview them. After all they will be lucky to have such an experienced and valuable BRM if you deem them good enough to accept their offer!

I hope the above helps some people, good luck and happy BRM job hunting!

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. :-)