APAC IT Business Relationship Manager

Eaton Corporate is hiring an APAC IT Business Relationship Manager in Shanghai, China.

What you'll do:

The IT Business Relationship Manager is accountable for enabling strong alignment between business priorities and IT capabilities across multiple business units, including CPC, PDSS, and GEIS. The role focuses on understanding business strategies and translating them into clear, prioritized IT demand that supports the company's strategic objectives.

Acting as the primary interface between senior business stakeholders and IT delivery teams, the IT Business Relationship Principal shapes and manages a portfolio of initiatives, ensuring work is well defined, appropriately prioritized, and effectively delivered through IT Centers of Excellence (COEs). The role plays a key part in building shared understanding and sustained alignment between business and IT.

With strong financial and commercial acumen, including experience in capital authorization requests (CAR), budget management, profit planning, and vendor and contract management, this role partners closely with business leaders to develop business cases, secure funding, govern medium- to large-scale initiatives, and deliver measurable outcomes and return on investment. The BRM provides delivery oversight, manages escalations, and ensures stable and effective support for critical systems and processes. It also supports complex process and organizational change and aligns directionally with senior leadership (President/SVP/VP/GM level), potentially across multiple regions.

Strategic Responsibilities

• Act as the customer advocate, ensuring alignment between customer strategy, IT strategy, and IT guiding principles.
• Identify and eliminate initiatives that are misaligned with IT strategy, deliver weak business value, or duplicate existing enterprise solutions.
• Ensure solutions align with enterprise architecture standards; partner with the Architecture team where standards do not exist.
• Be accountable to the customer for service provider performance and outcomes.
• Act as a trusted advisor, introducing appropriate innovation.
• Build Organizational Capabilities: Influence IT operating structures (e.g., COEs, development, production support) to better support customer needs.

• Serve as the primary point of contact for customer communication, including major incidents, escalations, and complaints, ensuring timely IT response.
• Establish, prioritize, and communicate customer project priorities within IT.
• Accountable for defining Outcome Commitments (OC) with project sponsors and for capturing and reporting results following sponsor approval.
• Develop and manage the customer IT project portfolio (Book of Business) and associated IT profit plans.
• Participate in Customer Review meetings, communicating IT budget and project status, key IT programs and production support issues, and changes in business strategy, priorities, or budgets.
• Distribute the annual stakeholder survey and track follow-up actions.

• Disaster Recovery (DR): Ensure DR plans are appropriately tiered, detailed, and executable; participate in DR testing and validate results.
• SOX Compliance: Ensure timely closure of SOX validation gaps in coordination with IT and/or Operations.

• Bachelor's degree required; master's degree preferred.
• 7-10 years of experience in IT applications, including 3+ years of direct project management experience.
• Advanced understanding of the overall business and/or assigned functional areas.
• Advanced knowledge of organizational structures, including both business and IT operating models.
• Solid understanding of the business strategic planning process.
• Solid understanding of key business processes within Eaton or a comparable organization.
• Intermediate understanding of financial processes, including budgeting and cost management.
• Advanced knowledge of key enterprise applications.
• Ability to serve as a subject matter expert (SME) in one or more functional, technical, or application areas.
• Understanding of system integration, dependencies, and global impact points across a division or function.

• Stakeholder Management: build effective relationships with senior business and IT leaders.
• Communication and Influence: drive alignment and outcomes across teams.
• Business Acumen: understand business strategy, priorities, and financial impacts.
• Prioritization: effectively manage demands and projects amid evolving priorities, ambiguity, and multiple stakeholders.
• Change Leadership: support process, system, and organizational changes.