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:
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Important to the business
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Should represent the results
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There should only be a few
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It should be clear if we achieved the outcome or not
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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