All compliance officers are de facto project managers. Whether you are conducting an internal audit, authoring and implementing policies and procedures, rolling out new compliance technology, or training employees on compliance requirements – all these projects go towards helping your firm execute its strategic goals.
At completion, a project must deliver on its intended outcome to be effective, and that means starting with (and keeping) the end objective in mind at all times. Below are core areas that help ensure strong project management skills:
- Keep Management Active – whether your project stakeholder is the CEO of your firm, an outside client, or a vendor, we all know it is important to get buy-in before starting anything. But buy-in alone isn’t enough; the stakeholder needs to be involved throughout. There will most likely be updates and corrections mid-course; new things to add, others to delete. Without input and support along the way, projects often get rescoped into something different from what was intended at the outset.
- Be Ready – projects are much more likely to realize their end objectives if users are trained and primed to adopt new practices quickly and efficiently. This is especially important for any process changes wanting to be made (such as implementing new reporting metrics or risk management technology).
- Learn from Mistakes – it is imperative to have a formal process to record lessons learned from projects and implement necessary changes accordingly. Postmortem meetings allow for documentation of lessons learned and help the team make more accurate forecasts for the next project, in addition to a smoother, more efficient workflow. Having that postmortem data to refer to serves as a crucial component to constantly improving as a team, as lessons learned are almost always applicable from one project to the next
Core Compliance can assist firms with performing all types of compliance projects, along with the implementation of any applicable procedures and controls. For more information, please contact us at (619) 278-0020 to schedule a consultation.