Business Relationship Management (BRM) Training: Aligning IT & the Business

Overview of Relationship Management

• Why organizations need successful relationships between IT and the business
• Balancing the needs of IT and the business
• Effectively aligning IT investments and business goals

Principles for Aligning IT and the Business

The trusted IT advisor

• Recognizing how trust feels
• Defining trust in an IT organization
• Building a trusted relationship

Business Relationship Management (BRM) roles

• IT relationship management vs. IT project management
• Discovering your strengths and weaknesses
• Required technical and social competencies

Determining the Current State of IT

Defining a catalog of services

• Identifying IT products and services
• The components of an ideal catalog
• Creating an initial catalog from scratch
• Ranking services with metrics

Developing awareness of the organizational culture

• The IntCRM Model
• Overcoming common IT relationship barriers
• Exploring how things get done in the organization
• Applying tools for culture analysis

Building the Trusted Relationship

Knowing your stakeholders

• The stakeholder relationship life cycle
• Classifying the roles stakeholders play
• The importance of stakeholder power and influence

Optimizing the first meeting

• Planning the meeting
• Models for understanding people
• Explaining the role of the BRM
• Confirming relationships and roles
• Leaving with actions

Planning the relationship strategy

• Analyzing the relationship
• Recruiting trusted teams
• Forming the plan
• Executing the strategy

Facilitating Actionable IT Solutions

Performing competitive analysis

• Evaluating IT outsourcing and consulting solutions
• Establishing your competitive advantage

Identifying opportunities for improvement

• Capturing, prioritizing and documenting business needs
• Applying a framework for prioritizing and selecting projects
• Picking quick-win projects

Designing a strategy to meet customer needs

• Conducting a modified SWOT analysis
• Questions you should ask
• Making a go or no-go decision

Winning Competitive IT Projects

Responding to requests

• Differentiating your services from your competitors'
• Communicating your internal IT capabilities to the business
• Validating business needs in business terms

Selling your solutions to the business

• Translating IT speak to business speak
• Linking IT solutions to pains
• Articulating IT solutions in terms of business value
• Writing clear, tailored Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

Managing project handoffs

• Ensuring a seamless transition
• Creating and maintaining communication channels
• Building the relationship

The IT relationship scorecard

• Establishing performance metrics
• Assessing BRM success
• Analyzing results