Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Business Relationship Manager

🎯 Role Definition

The Business Relationship Manager (BRM) acts as the strategic liaison between business units and service/technology teams to ensure investments deliver measurable business value. The BRM builds trusted relationships with stakeholders, drives demand prioritization and governance, shapes business cases and roadmaps, and orchestrates cross-functional efforts to realize outcomes such as revenue growth, cost reduction, improved customer experience, or risk mitigation. This role requires commercial acumen, strong stakeholder management, and the ability to translate business strategy into measurable delivery priorities.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Business Analyst with proven stakeholder engagement experience
IT Project/Program Manager who has managed cross-functional delivery
Account Manager or Client Services Manager with internal enterprise experience

Advancement To:

Senior Business Relationship Manager / Lead BRM
Head of BRM / Director of Business Partnering
Director of Strategy, Portfolio or Product / VP of Business Partnerships

Lateral Moves:

Product Manager or Product Owner
Program Manager or Portfolio Manager
Vendor / Supplier Relationship Manager

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Serve as the primary business-facing point of contact for assigned business units, proactively building trust and maintaining an ongoing partnership to identify, prioritize, and track business outcomes tied to IT and service investments.
Co-develop and maintain an annual account plan and multi-quarter roadmap with business stakeholders that aligns technology initiatives and service delivery to the unit’s strategic objectives and measurable KPIs.
Assess, validate and prioritize demand by evaluating business cases, expected value, cost, risk and feasibility; recommend prioritized work backlogs to governance forums while ensuring alignment with enterprise strategy.
Lead the creation and negotiation of value-driven business cases and investment proposals, including ROI analysis, benefits realization plans, cost estimates, and risk/mitigation strategies to secure funding and executive approval.
Facilitate cross-functional governance and steering committees (e.g., BRM councils, portfolio boards) to ensure clear decision-making, resource allocation, and escalation paths for high-impact initiatives.
Translate business strategy into clear requirements and acceptance criteria for delivery teams, working closely with solution architects, product managers and project leads to minimize scope creep and ensure fit-for-purpose outcomes.
Monitor and manage ongoing service performance and supplier delivery against SLAs, OLAs, and commercial contracts; proactively raise issues, drive remediation plans and ensure accountability.
Champion benefits realization by establishing baselines, tracking KPIs, organizing benefits tracking processes, and reporting achieved outcomes to business sponsors and executives.
Build and maintain stakeholder maps and influence networks; perform regular stakeholder health checks and maturity assessments to identify relationship risks and improvement opportunities.
Drive continuous improvement and service optimization by capturing feedback, identifying process improvements, and partnering with service management to implement operational changes.
Manage stakeholder expectations through clear communication of delivery timelines, constraints, trade-offs and change impacts; prepare and present executive-level briefings and status reports.
Coordinate business acceptance and go-live readiness activities including training, communications, cutover planning and post-implementation reviews to ensure smooth adoption and realization of expected benefits.
Act as a change agent: identify organizational readiness gaps, partner with change management and HR to define adoption campaigns, user enablement and success metrics.
Negotiate and manage third-party/vendor relationships and commercial terms where business outcomes rely on external suppliers; support procurement and contract governance activities.
Lead risk identification and issue management related to business-facing initiatives, escalating to governance fora and working across teams to remove blockers and secure resources.
Use data-driven insights and analytics to inform prioritization; partner with BI/analytics teams to define the right metrics, dashboards and reporting cadence for business sponsors.
Coach and mentor junior BRMs, business analysts, and partner teams on demand management, stakeholder engagement techniques and business-value frameworks.
Represent business priorities in portfolio planning and resource allocation discussions to ensure a balanced, strategic mix of run, grow and transform activities.
Ensure compliance with enterprise architecture, security, regulatory and audit requirements by coordinating with relevant functions and embedding controls into project lifecycles.
Drive customer-centricity by gathering customer feedback, performing voice-of-customer activities and ensuring that digital and operational initiatives improve end-user experience.
Prepare and maintain comprehensive documentation including account plans, stakeholder registers, value realization plans, slotted roadmaps and post-implementation lessons learned.
Lead root-cause analysis after significant incidents or delivery failures and drive corrective actions across product, engineering and operations teams.
Participate in strategic vendor selection and evaluation processes by defining business requirements, evaluating vendor fit and supporting due diligence activities.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc data requests and collaborate with analytics teams to produce insights that inform investment decisions and business case assumptions.
Contribute to the organization's BRM capability roadmap, templates and standardized processes to ensure consistent value-focused delivery across business units.
Collaborate with enterprise architecture, security and compliance teams to ensure solutions meet non-functional requirements and regulatory obligations.
Participate in sprint planning, PI planning or other agile ceremonies as the business voice, clarifying priorities and acceptance criteria for development teams.
Facilitate workshops, discovery sessions and design thinking exercises to elicit requirements and surface creative solutions aligned to stakeholder needs.
Provide support during procurement and contracting cycles by articulating desired business outcomes and acceptance conditions.
Help define and maintain performance dashboards (e.g., benefits realization tracker, SLA/SLO dashboards) to provide transparent visibility to stakeholders and executives.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Business Relationship Management frameworks and best practices (BRM Institute knowledge a plus).
Stakeholder mapping, account planning and demand management.
Business case development, cost-benefit analysis and financial ROI modeling.
Service management concepts: SLAs, OLAs, SLOs; familiarity with ITIL practices.
Vendor and contract management, including RFP/RFI support and commercial negotiation.
Portfolio and roadmap planning tools and techniques (e.g., roadmaps, WSJF, prioritization frameworks).
Project/program management fundamentals (PMP/Prince2/Agile certifications beneficial).
Experience with CRM and portfolio tools (Salesforce, ServiceNow, JIRA, Aha!, or Workfront).
Data literacy and ability to work with BI tools and metrics (Power BI, Tableau, Excel advanced).
Familiarity with Agile delivery models (Scrum/Kanban), SAFe or other scaled agile frameworks.

Soft Skills

Exceptional stakeholder management and executive presence—able to influence across all levels.
Strong verbal and written communication; able to prepare concise executive summaries and compelling presentations.
Strategic thinking and commercial acumen with a focus on measurable business outcomes.
Negotiation and conflict resolution skills for managing trade-offs and supplier relationships.
Facilitation and workshop leadership to drive consensus across diverse stakeholder groups.
Problem-solving mindset and ability to work through ambiguity and complexity.
Empathy and active listening to surface underlying business needs and latent requirements.
Change leadership and coaching skills to support adoption and organizational readiness.
Collaboration and team-orientation to work across product, engineering, operations and finance.
Time management and prioritization skills to balance multiple accounts and competing priorities.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, Information Systems, Computer Science, Finance, or related discipline.

Preferred Education:

Master’s degree (MBA, MSc in Information Management, or related) or relevant professional certifications (BRM Institute, PMP, ITIL, Certified Scrum Product Owner).

Relevant Fields of Study:

Business Administration / Management
Information Technology / Information Systems
Finance / Economics
Computer Science
Organizational Change / Human Resources

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

5–8 years in a business-facing role (business analysis, account management, product or project management), or 3–5 years for senior/large-account BRM roles depending on scope.

Preferred:

7+ years of experience in enterprise IT or shared services, with demonstrated success in stakeholder management, benefits realization and portfolio prioritization.
Experience working in matrixed organizations, with exposure to digital transformation programs, large-scale change initiatives, or vendor-managed services.