IT Business Relationship Manager

An IT Business Relationship Manager (IT BRM) is a liaison or go-between personnel for the IT department and other interfacing business units within the organization. In other words, departments that offers or consumes IT services communicates their needs, challenges and service expectations through the IT Business Relationship Manager (IT BRM). The IT BRM helps to collate business requirements, service expectations and pain points of various departments/units that require IT services to ensure effective service delivery and value to stakeholders. Just like a relationshion manager who ensure that the needs and expectations of their customers are met and surpassed, an IT BRM ensure that IT services consumers are happy with services being provided and challenges and paint points hampering smooth service are highlighted and dealt with in a timely manner before it create more complex problems.

The IT Business Relationship Manager during engagements with the business units and service consumers collect business requirements, key performance indicators and metrics, timelines for serices, business expectations and other information required to enable IT scope, build, test and deliver that service. Ultimately, an IT BRM ensure that all IT projects and services deliver value and returns on investment (ROI) to all stakeholders.

An IT Business Relationship manages relationships with third party service providers and vendors and ensure that services defined in the contract and service level agreements are delivered as expected. In doing this, the IT BRM articualate and document metrics for measurement and monitoring of services provided by vendors and ensure that such metrics are measurable and aligns with the overall business objectives. The IT Business Relationship Manager should be skilled in business requirement analysis, relationship management, project management, SCRUM mastery, team building, communications, enterprise architecture, interpersonal skills, among others.

The IT BRM responsibilities are mostly tilted towards project management, solution delivery and business relationships and as such, should be skilled and savy with project management. To pursue a career in IT BRM, a candidate should acquire certifications such as Prince2, PMP, Scrum Master, ITIL, ISO 20000 (IT Service Management), etc.