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

• Build a strong alignment between IT and the business
• Plan a strategy that positions you as a trusted IT advisor to key stakeholders
• Perform an analysis of IT's services and culture
• Choose IT projects that have a high likelihood of building trust
• Create clear and effective service delivery agreements, including SLAs, MOUs and MOAs
• Differentiate your internal IT services from competitive solutions

Overview of Relationship Management

• Why organizations need an ITRM
• Balancing the needs of IT and the business
• What good alignment looks like

Principles for Aligning IT and the Business

The trusted IT advisor

• Recognizing what trust feels like
• Defining trust in an IT organization
• The process for building trust

Role of the IT Relationship Manager (ITRM)

• IT relationship management vs. IT project management
• Discovering your strengths and weaknesses
• Technical and social competencies of an ITRM

Determining IT's Current State

Defining a catalog of services

• Recognizing IT 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
• Applying tools for culture analysis

Building the Trusted Relationship

Knowing your stakeholders

• Identifying business and IT stakeholders
• The stakeholder relationship life cycle
• Classifying the roles stakeholders play

Optimizing the first meeting

• Planning the meeting
• Models for understanding people
• Explaining the role of the ITRM
• 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
• Differentiating performance, service and training needs
• 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

Evaluating results

• Establishing performance metrics
• Assessing ITRM success
• Planning your next steps

Winning Competitive IT Projects

Responding to requests

• Differentiating your services from your competitors'
• Communicating your internal IT capabilities to the business

Selling your solutions to the business

• Translating IT speak to business speak
• Creatively communicating your understanding of stakeholder pains
• Linking IT solutions to pains
• Negotiating agreements that suppo
  RealityPlus
  Extensive performance-based activities throughout this course immerse you in the role of an IT Relationship Manager. You gain practical experience in both the technical and social nuances of serving as a trusted IT advisor to the business. Activities include:
  • Experiencing trust firsthand through a dynamic simulation
  • Evaluating stakeholders to determine their level of influence and power
  • Uncovering and documenting an IT organization's catalog of services, including catalog management
  • Recommending solutions to complex, simulated IT relationship problems
  • Negotiating and documenting business agreements using industry-standard formats
  • Collaborating with others to foster new ideas and innovations
  • Assessing performance with a relationship scorecard