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

Business Relationship Management (BRM) Course Outline

• 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 catalogue of services

  • Identifying IT products and services
  • The components of an ideal catalogue
  • Creating an initial catalogue 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