Beginning the next section of the BRMP training from ITSM Zone entitled "Business IQ", I quickly started to
see how the pieces of BRM were falling into place. While this section has quite
a few important components such as business capability and value leakage, it
was the piece on business outcomes in the value management section that struck
a chord with me.
We have heard it a million times if we have heard it
once, "Tie it back to business outcomes."
So what’s the deal?
As it is outlined in the module via BRMI “Business Outcomes are a
means to establishing a discipline of value – from clarifying an opportunity,
through to managing scope, establishing focus and ownership, through to
measuring and optimizing realized value.”
I began to think about my own experiences with business
outcomes. In places where we, as a provider organization, had challenges with
them were when they were too basic. In other words having a simple statement
where the goal is “to make more money” we always had trouble translating this.
In many cases what happened was that the provider (in my
case IT) took this simplified objective and made some assumptions on how to
make this happen. The trouble as we often found out was that we never maximized
the potential since we weren’t dealing with specifics.
What I learned in the coursework was that we need to
ensure that there is more clarity in these outcomes to improve on identifying
priorities across competing initiatives, defining/measuring value and
clarifying business strategy and needs among other things
All business objectives should have some basic
characteristics including:
Important to the business
Should represent the results
There should only be a few
It should be clear if we achieved the outcome or not
It should be (SMART) specific, measureable, achievable, relevant and timebound
Even using this as a discussion point with your business will
allow you to ask better questions of the business partner to be able to have an
improved understanding of the goals for the business
For more information check the BRMI and consider membership to
reap the full benefits available.
Feel free to send me questions, comments or any other
feedback
Follow me on Twitter @ryanrogilvie or connect with me on LinkedIn
Labels: BRM, BRMP, Business Relationship Management, business value, ITSM
