Negotiation Skills

Relationship managers must be crack negotiators. "There can be competing objectives, and you have to defuse emotion to help make a fact-based decision," says Gina Piscopo, who has a relationship manager role as a director in the marketing technology area of Allstate Protection Technology at Allstate Insurance. For instance, when IT was struggling with a tight deadline for a business project, Piscopo stepped in to ask people on the business side if they could scale back the functionality of what they wanted delivered by that deadline.

That kind of active negotiating can lead to some sticky situations. "You have to have thick skin," says Joan Mann, associate professor of IT at Old Dominion University in Virginia. "You have to be able to roll with the punches and be very comfortable in the face of uncertainty."

Mediator, translator, persuader, facilitator, expeditor - these are roles Mann says relationship managers need to play. Not to mention the languages they need to speak. "To earn the respect of IS, you have to speak at the router, T1 and application code level," says Sheppard. "With the business people, it's important to talk at the profit/loss and deliverables level."

But the relationship manager can't play all these roles on his own. Most companies find that they need to tweak organizational charts to provide the support they need to straddle the space between IT and the business; otherwise, the relationship manager can easily fall into thin air. "I have not seen the role be successful when it's a stand-alone liaison role," says Mike Roche, vice president of Allstate Protection Technology.

Allstate began hiring relationship managers two years ago. At the time, IT was retooled from a shared-services organization with an admitted "arm's-length relationship with the business", Roche says, to a group with a CIO and dedicated IT staff for each of the two major arms of the company.

Relationship managers were installed to serve as liaisons between IT and the business functions, but the setup was only somewhat successful, Roche says. The problem, he determined, was that the individuals in these roles had no accountability for delivering on projects. "It's easy to be an order taker and create demand without having any indication of what's reasonable from a delivery standpoint," he explains.

Now, the relationship managers have teams of developers and project managers assigned to them, and - most important - they are responsible for achieving measurable results. "We expect these lead people to be innovative in terms of process improvements," Roche says.

Without that kind of accountability, he says, the relationship manager stands no chance of earning credibility and may even create a layer of redundancy. "If they're pushing through requirements but don't understand the technology that supports it, someone has to rework everything they do," Roche says.