Shifting from Business Relationship Management to Relationship Management in ITIL 4

Why is Relationship Management Important?

Our ability as individuals and leaders to forge and deepen relationships with those around us is critical to our organizations’ success. However, these kinds of “soft skills” continue to take a backseat to more technical training or “hard skills” — often to the detriment of our organizations and relationships. The future of being able to provide great technology-focused products and services comes from Relationship Management, connecting with those around us and forging long-lasting, trusting bonds.

The good news is that this emphasis on solely “hard skills” development is starting to change. In fact, in just the last few years, professional organizations and certifications around Business Relationship Management, or BRM, have cropped up to address this need and develop a formal skillset, career path, competency, and body of knowledge. This article will provide an overview of BRM (introduced as part of the ITIL v3 library) as well as what ITIL 4 now calls “Relationship Management” along with some tips and tricks to help strengthen our relationship-building skills.

The Introduction of Business Relationship Management in ITIL v3

In 2011, the ITIL library introduced a process called Business Relationship Management, which sought to better align those working in IT with other parts of an organization (the “business” side). It was the first time that such an important, customer-facing role was formally introduced to IT professionals in a well-known international standard.

Since that time, many organizational landscapes have evolved, and IT does not just serve internal customers. Today’s technology professionals may serve external customers, either directly or in conjunction with other teams. In fact, in agile organizations, members of IT may even be outside the traditional “shared service” IT model, instead working as part of a cross-functional team aligned via Value Streams. Thus, with the introduction of ITIL 4 in 2019, the word “business” was dropped to align with these industry trends.

What is Relationship Management in ITIL 4?

What does ITIL 4 have to say about Relationship Management? Let’s start with the purpose:

The Strategic Role of a Relationship Manager

We could say that we regularly build relationships with everyone that we interact with – either formally or informally. We are communicating all the time. So, what makes the role of a relationship manager different? Aren’t we all, to some extent, relationship managers? Yes. However, the role of a relationship manager — someone that does this kind of work as a large part of their job — is a strategic role. Thus, it is often held by seasoned people with strong “soft skills” that may or may not be in a leadership role (more on that later).

Relationship Management is often termed a “high-touch” not a “high-tech” role as it’s focused on the human component of how we can better serve and co-create value with our key stakeholders. Stakeholders can include a variety of different groups: essential customers or users, investors, partners, internal teams, even suppliers.

Relationship Management is About Staying Connected

Often, we naively think we have strong relationships with and really know the stakeholders around us. However, if we’re not regularly connecting, we don’t tend to have as strong of a relationship as we think. For example, you may have lots of acquaintances on LinkedIn, but if you think about how many of your connections you talk with on a regular basis (monthly, let’s say), you could probably count that list on one hand. The same is true for those we interact with at work. Relationship Management is a “quality” game; not one of “quantity.” It’s about making time to have conversations with the people we want to build stronger relationships with, being of help to them, and staying in regular contact.

The Role of a Relationship Manager is Human

When we really stop and think about it, yes, we’re often delivering technology-focused products and services to our customers, but humans are delivering them to other humans. Our interactions are deeply human and require empathy and compassion, emotional intelligence, patience, curiosity, active listening, and a host of other soft skills to build trust and effectiveness (I’ve included a more extensive list below). It is a bit of an art and a science to get right and to do well.

To add to this ever-growing list, some of the characteristics of good Relationship Management in the ITIL 4 Practice Guide include the following:

• Shared goals
• No-blame cooperation and collaboration
• Continuous learning
• Open and transparent communication
• Conflict mediation and prevention

In fact, a key message in the ITIL 4 Relationship Management Practice Guide states:

How well we manage and deepen our relationships can have a huge impact on the bottom line, the health and performance of our teams, the overall culture of our organizations, and the success of our partnerships. Relationship Management has an impact on all parts of our organization — particularly when we’re dealing with products and services that are tailored to specific customer needs, where innovation and creativity are needed in the relationship, and where we’re trying to build long-term relationships, these skills become crucial. Fortunately, just like with any other skill, we can become very good at it with practice.

The Role of a Relationship Manager Involves Understanding Differences

Organizations and countries often have very different cultures – what’s polite and what’s not; and it’s important for relationship managers to understand these differences. For example, we work with a partner in Brazil; and I very much appreciated my main point of contact, Maria, giving me a lesson on the Brazilian culture and how people work. She told me that Brazilians generally like to spend a little time at the beginning of every call chatting about their lives and sharing their weekend plans; and we Americans can be perceived as less personable when we skip past that part of the conversation. Brazilians (according to Maria) also don’t tend to love answering email. Thus, she informed me that if I wanted a quick response to an email, I needed to send a follow-up to my email with a message on WhatsApp saying that I had emailed her something urgent. Skipping past chit chat, not turning on our cameras when on a video call, etc. could be considered rude if we don’t understand the expectations, culture, and norms of those we’re talking with. I really appreciated being told that and changed my approach accordingly.

Relationship Management is about Adding Value

Taking it one step further, asking about expectations and norms upfront can be extremely helpful in building a strong foundation for future conversations and healthy relationships. Asking questions like “How can I best add value?” and then following through and bringing value to every conversation is key. We are all exceptionally busy these days, and people will stop making time to talk with us if the conversation isn’t worthwhile. Further, people like talking with people they know, trust, and like. Thus, the job of a relationship manager is to be someone that is known, trusted, and liked. In fact, in the “Likeability Factor” by Tim Sanders, former Chief Evangelist at Yahoo!, says there are four factors that help make someone likeable: 1) Friendliness, 2) Relevance, 3) Empathy, and 4) Realness; and it’s key that we develop these characteristics in ourselves. For me, I enjoy working with people I like and tend to make time to talk with them. For those I don’t, well, I don’t. You probably don’t either.

Relationship Management is about Building Trust

Trust can make or break relationships and it’s worth delving into this topic a bit. The Drive Stakeholder Value book and course (detailed at the end of this article) includes a concept about how trust is built by using the 3 Cs. In order to build trust, either within our own teams or with those external to our organizations, we have to have commitment to shared goals, we have to do what we say we’ll do and make sure the work gets done consistently each time, and we must have the time, energy, and skills or capability, to do a good job. When we do these three things, over time, we build trust. In fact, this is such an important concept for us in our classes that we break students up into teams and do an activity to detail what this looks like in real life (see below).

3 Cs activity in an ITIL 4 DSV Course

Relationship Management is a Journey

One of the things I like about the ITIL 4 Relationship Management Practice Guide is how it describes that relationship building is, in fact, a journey. Strong “roots” in relationships, just as in plants, don’t often happen instantly. Rather, they are grown and established over time. Sometimes, we may find an instant connection (“You’re a die-hard ‘Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy’ fan, too?! Cool! 42, ammiright?”). However, trust and value are delivered over a multitude of several seemingly small conversations; and the relationship itself may change over time. Good Relationship Management is not something transactional, but rather a journey of several steps.

Who should be a Relationship Manager and what do BRM titles look like?

With all of that said, who is a good fit for the role of a relationship manager? There are lots of different types of people that can serve as strong relationship managers: from the C-suite of an organization to federal program managers, account managers, customer service/experience managers, business development staff, you name it. I tend to see the role of relationship manager as really just that – a role, not necessarily a title. If your job is to build relationships with key customers, prospects, and/or partners, you are functioning as a relationship manager, and these concepts can help you in your day-to-day role, even if it’s not officially part of your title.

It’s only really in large organizations where you might see someone with both the role and title of relationship managers (or BRM). With that said, many of us chafe at the idea of adding another “hat” to our job descriptions. In cases like this, it tends to work best when we put a relationship manager in a role that naturally crosses over from IT to the business side. For example, I’ve seen very skilled service delivery managers and service catalog managers excel and become great relationship managers.

What’s included in the Role of a RM? What Does a Relationship Manager Do?

Specific activities can vary, however, most people that function as a relationship manager spend a good deal of time working with and interacting with customers. This may involve going on-site to meet with them face-to-face, asking lots of open-ended questions on how well our organization is serving them (good, bad, or ugly), what challenges they’re currently facing, how we can do a better job, discussing new and existing products and services that customers or other key stakeholders may not be aware of, and discussing future, long-term challenges and trends. Relationship Management works well when there’s a cadence to it (monthly, quarterly, etc.). Otherwise, it’s easy to get busy doing other work and not regularly connect with those we deem to be important.

We worked with an area of the State Department that had relationship managers, and they would spend a few days each month going on-site with their customers to observe how they work, see how they were using their products and services (which was eye opening as customers navigated their software, in particular, very differently than they thought they did, and it gave them lots of ideas on where to make future changes), and generally see how they could be of help to them both today and into the future. These relationship managers were well-liked by their customers because they were seen as people who genuinely cared about how their customers were doing, and it helped build a bridge between the two organizations.

Some additional Relationship Management activities can include:

• Contributing to and reviewing SLA results with customers, suppliers, and/or internal teams (more on the Service Level Management practice in ITIL 4 here)
• Crafting, documenting, and/or improving the overall Relationship Management practice across the organization
• Meeting regularly with key customers, partners, suppliers, etc., sending follow-up emails, and supporting other relationship managers in improving key relationships
• Managing and addressing risks, issues, and concerns raised by customers, partners, suppliers, etc. in a timely manner.
• Developing a deep understanding of our organization’s capabilities and how we solve problems for customers, users, etc. providing examples and stories around solutions to these key stakeholders.
• Connecting regularly with other relationship managers to exchange ideas and discuss what’s going well, what’s not, ways to improve, etc. as well discussing relevant themes heard from stakeholders.

How does Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Lead Relationship Management (LRM), and Customer Experience Management (CEM) compare to Relationship Management?

There are several related Relationship Management-type concepts, including customer-facing roles. There are, however, some differences between them, which we will briefly cover here. CRM and LRM tend to focus on turning prospects and leads into customers and are often seen as a subset of Relationship Management. CRM tends to go beyond LRM to include deepening relationships with our existing customers and keeping track of our conversations with them (often in a CRM tool like Salesforce or HubSpot).

Customer Experience Management, however, is more focused on how customers perceive us and changing that overall experience for the better. It can include techniques like crafting customer personas and mapping our “Customer Journey.” A 3-day Drive Stakeholder Value course is a great start for learning the basics of CEM (see the training section below for more details).

How do Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) and Partner Relationship Managers (PRM) compare to Relationship Management?

Organizations have a variety of tools and techniques at their disposal to strengthen how they work with strategic partners and suppliers. The same relationship building concepts hold true here. The only difference in this type of relationship is that we are the consumer of products and services rather than the provider.

Similar to the customer journey, we can map out our Supplier or Partner Journey, which allows us to standardize and/or automate steps where needed and enhance the experience that partners and suppliers have in working with us. For more details on managing supplier relationships, check out the Practice Guide on Supplier Management in ITIL 4, which provides a deeper dive into this topic.

How does Employee Relationship Management (ERM) compare to Relationship Management?

An Employee Journey starts long before they begin working at our organization and can last for years. It begins when people are first exposed to our organization, through the recruiting and interviewing process, acceptance of a job offer, pre-boarding (the time between accepting an offer and actually starting work) and continues into their experience working for our organization and beyond. Once they’re on board, it our job to ensure they have a good experience in continual learning and personal development, mentoring and coaching, gathering and providing feedback, professional development, performance measurement, and/or succession planning.

The idea here is that the experience our internal staff has is critically important. Happy and fulfilled people and teams produce great products and services for our customers and improve the bottom line. Mapping out that journey and getting employee feedback (for example, at Beyond20, we have found tremendous value in sending out quarterly employee NPS surveys) can help us ensure we build and maintain strong internal relationships. The ITIL 4 Workforce and Talent Management Practice also provides lots of additional advice on this topic.

Where can I find Relationship Management training?

There are several ITIL 4 publications and certification courses that cover the Relationship Management practice, including:

• The Drive Stakeholder Value (DSV) book, course, and exam, which discuss strengthening the relationship between service providers and consumers.
• The Create, Deliver, and Support (CDS) book, course, and exam, which provide an overview of Relationship Management as a critical role and skillset in organizations.
• The Digital and IT Strategy (DITS) book, course and exam, which cover the importance of digital leaders building strong Relationship Management skills with those around them including customers, peers, partners, and staff.

The BRM Institute (BRMI) also has two key certification courses for BRMs:

• Business Relationship Management Professional Foundation (BRMP)
• Certified Business Relationship Manager Practitioner (CBRM)

Where Can I Find the ITIL 4 Relationship Management Practice Guide?

Last, the Relationship Management Practice Guide document is a free download from the AXELOS website. It’s about 30 pages in all and provides some additional information on this fascinating topic. AXELOS provides electronic versions of 34 Practice Guides you can download as part of their MyITIL program. Anyone that’s taken an ITIL 4 course and passed the exam receives a free subscription to MyITIL for one year. After that, the cost of the subscription is $50 annually.