Tara Lamplough, Head of Business Partnering, shares her reflections on findings from the BRMConnect Conference in New Orleans. This is the first in a short series of blog posts about the BRMConnect Conference.
This year thanks to a UCISA bursary I was able to attend the BRMConnect conference in New Orleans. BRMConnect is the annual conference from the Business Relationship Management Institute – which is the professional body for people who carry out Business Partner type roles.
Value was the predominant theme across the conference sessions. How do we assess the potential benefits for new IT project ideas so we’re working on the right things? What should we monitor throughout the delivery phase to check we’ve not lost all of the intended value along the way? Once a service is released what service improvements need to be scheduled to maximise the value from our investments?
This resonated with me as there is sometimes the view that releasing a new technology live is the sign of success. It’s a good first step but we should also be understanding if that technology has actually delivered any value to the University – its staff and its students. We won’t always know that at go-live and may need to review a few months later.
The Business Partnering team are often brought in to ‘fix’ IT solutions that have not been adopted by users or have failed to deliver on their initial promise. If an IT solution has failed to be adopted and has no users then the IT effort spent on it was completely wasted – and we need to learn from that so we don’t do it again. With every project change there is the potential that the original value expectations have been diminished so we need to be vigilant and ready to intervene (to correct course or stop).
The BRM Institute uses the analogy of a leaky pipe to show that a great idea with high business benefit can over time see its value leak away and eventually deliver only a small proportion of the initial hopes and dreams.
Reflecting on this theme back at the University of Birmingham, it has clarified for me the importance of reviewing and reflecting on any changes to value at each Gate or stage of a project. We should have the opportunity at the BSC portfolio board to stop or de-prioritise projects if the potential benefits have decreased (note: there is also likely to be some culture change required here so we can confidently stop projects/developments as this rarely happens now). We also need to see the go-live as the only starting point for realising value from an IT investment and therefore reflecting back on the initial ambitions is a good place to start when developing service improvement plans.
Find out more
Contact Tara directly if you’d like to know more about the BRMConnect conference, or would like to discuss how we can bring further value to the services that IT Services provides.