The Business Relationship Manager

The Business Relationship Manager is a role that serves as a strategic interface between the IT Service Provider and one or more Business Partners (or Business Units within a single organization) to promote, and influence Business Demand for IT services and products. They also work to ensure that the potential business value from those products and services is realized, optimized and properly documented. The Business Relationship Manager can accomplish this through the engagement of four core disciplines which are defined as part of the house of Business Relationship Management (BRM). This house is built upon a foundation of BRM competencies which support the Business Relationship Manager role and ensure it has the skills and aptitudes to be effective and deliver value to both the Provider and its Business Partner.

The Four Core BRM Disciplines:

Demand Shaping: This discipline stimulates and shapes business demand for the provider’s services, capabilities and products. It ensures that the business strategies can fully leverage these services, capabilities and products within the provider’s portfolio. BRM also ensures that the provider’s portfolio has the right mix of these items so that the business strategy can be enabled through the engagement of them.

Exploring: This discipline identifies and justifies demand. BRM helps to identify business and technology trends to enable discovery and demand identification. This is an iterative process which facilitates the review of new business, industry and technology trends with the potential to create value for the business environment. The key benefit here, is the identification of prioritized business value initiatives that will then manifest themselves as aligned and supportive services, capabilities and products within the provider’s portfolio.

Servicing: The servicing discipline coordinates resources, manages Business Partner expectations and integrates activities in accordance with the business-provider partnership. This will ensure that business-provider engagement will translate into effective supply requirements. Servicing enables the alignment to the business strategy through the use of Business Capability Roadmapping along with portfolio and program management.

Value Harvesting: This discipline ensures the success of the business change initiatives that result from the exploring and servicing activities. Value harvesting includes activities to track and review performance, identify ways to increase business value from the business-provider initiatives and services and instigates feedback that will trigger the continuous improvement cycles. This process provides the stakeholders with the appropriate insights into the results of business change and initiatives.

These four core disciplines, along with best practice capabilities and defined competencies, allow the BRM to be fully integrated with business processes that generate demand and the provider capabilities for servicing it.

Ref: BRMIBOK

For more information: http://www.itsmacademy.com/brmp

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