My Journey to becoming a Business Relationship Manager (BRM)

I feel like I have told this story in one form or another multiple times to different people at different places but never really committed it to paper. However, after a conversation with APMG at a BRM European networking event, I thought why not?. So, here’s a potted history of my career path, focusing on Business Relationship Management. Hopefully if you are a BRM or an aspiring one it will help you avoid my mistakes and improve on my successes!

So, let’s start back at the beginning. Growing up I had my two parents and my older brother, one parent worked as a Lecturer of Politics at Loughborough University and the other worked as a Computer Programmer at various organisations. Little did I know then as a child, how my parent's career choices would have such an impact on my own. What do you get if you cross a University Lecturer and a Computer Programmer?

At school I excelled at Information Technology, Maths and Science and scraped by at anything vaguely artistic (lucky for me I obtained an artistic wife to address this balance for our children). I was also interested in Business Studies and took A-levels in Computer Science, Physics and Business Studies, I then went on to University to study Business Information Systems. At the time I believed this to be the easy parts of Business Studies and the easy parts of Computer Science, looking for the path of least resistance to a University degree!

After graduating I found a job at the local council offices providing IT Support, running around with a screwdriver, packs of floppy disks (yes we still had them then), CD’s and fixing people's computers. Then an opportunity arose to move over to provide this at Loughborough University, my dad being a lecturer there said this would be very good for as I would have a job for life there. The University was and still is renowned for employing people for their entire lives offering them different roles and responsibilities and also a great work life balance. So off I went to Loughborough University working in IT Support and then progressing to Desktop Development, then Server Administration, but I started to notice one important skill I had which lots of other technical people within IT struggled with, I could communicate with people outside of IT!

So yes, my technical skills were definitely not as good as my colleague’s, I struggled with Linux and my scripting was pretty basic, but I had better ‘softer’ skills. This was soon recognised by my line manager and she put me into more of an Account Manager role, going out talking to the business finding out what they wanted, making sure they were happy and re-charging for our services as well as doing the financials.

At this time, we were working towards best practices from ITIL and trying to streamline processes. One of the big, major steps I took was to remove internal recharging. Would we really get requests for 100’s of servers if we didn’t recharge? We just needed to ensure we had the right governance and control in place and then we could stop the needless process of handing money back and forth.

Then as I made a name for myself in the University as someone who understood the business and could translate the technical jargon into words that meant something to all stakeholders, I started getting more and more meeting invitations.  I was slowly becoming a BRM, even though, at this point, I still had no idea the role even existed.

As our IT department matured into ITIL service delivery we restructured again and again to adjust to best serve the new working practices. During one such restructure I was approached to be half Relationship Manager and half Server Administrator. I was already doing this unofficially so took the job title and role change with no problems at all, but with this new official role I thought I had better start to research best practices to make the most of it.

Initially I looked to ITIL, which was at that time the golden fountain of knowledge we should all go and drink from at every opportunity. I found a course I could attend, run by the British Computer Society and off I went on my BRM journey. This first foray into BRM training and development was OK but it was still focused on service delivery which at the time was my aim, little did I know what BRM potential was around the corner....

Continuing my Google searching for best practices I stumbled across something new - the BRM Institute, this looked like a fantastic resource of information and there was also a community you could fire questions at, I signed up immediately. Reading through the content I kept asking questions, how would this work in my situation where I have this particular set up? The replies came quickly and they were valuable, they gave me real insight into different ways of working out how this BRM function could be so much more than just service delivery.

My conversations with the people at the BRM Institute grew and grew until they offered me a voluntary role working on their leadership team. I was apprehensive at first, after all I was the one asking all the questions.  Would I now be expected to be providing the answers? They said just keep involved, keep giving input and come over to America and help out at the first global BRM conference. Loughborough University were supportive and paid for my flight over, I met my fellow Leaders and we instantly hit it off, we were all finding our feet and decided to just do our best and see how it went. Well it went fantastically, we had BRM’s from around the globe telling their stories and we helped facilitate, we sat on discussion panels and helped our fellow BRMs solve problems we had solved ourselves back in our organisations. It was so rewarding and inspiring to be exposed to such a vibrant and dynamic group of BRMs, I flew back to the UK full of ideas and reenergised for the role.

I was then approached by IT Winners to see if I would be interested in delivering BRM training. Wow what a fantastic opportunity! I said yes straight away. Having passed the Business Relationship Management Professional (BRMP^®) followed by the higher level of Certified Business Relationship Manager (CBRM^®) exams, I was then assessed by APMG who came out and watched me train, gave me a knowledge test and got me to the point of being a certified BRM trainer. Now I take a small number of annual leave days to deliver both private and public training classes, which I find wholly rewarding and as I deliver and get the discussions going, I continue to learn more and more. This then feeds back into my day job at Loughborough University helping me to become an even better BRM myself.

So, going back to the beginning question what do you get if you cross a University Politics Lecturer with a Computer Programmer?

Answer a University IT Business Relationship Manager who trains!