Best Practices For Compliance Project Management

When you focus on appreciating small achievements from different individuals, you’ll successfully grow your organization into incredible wins. The challenge that drags many managers from reaching their goals is the inability to allow other employees to take the credit for achievements in their organizations. If you’re in such a situation, then you shouldn’t allow pride and ego to control you since it will ruin your fortunes!

How Do You Achieve the Bigger Goals? One Step at a Time

Project management requires a high level of discipline to achieve the desired reward. Individuals react differently when they win a contract with a high-profile company to undertake a significantly rewarding compliance project.

Only a few understand that winning the contract means starting the long journey of planning, coordinating, and implementing. This cadre fathoms the demanding work associated with the project and will only celebrate after the successful completion of the project.

Some other individuals are engulfed in fear of the unknown! They think the project is too big for them to handle. This feeling is normal, especially if you’re handling a big project for the first time. However, you should manage it since it can spin your profession into oblivion!

Most individuals lie in between the two scenarios. While they understand that winning the contract means getting started with the work, they still have a fear of how it will turn out in the end.

Whatever your scenario, you should never allow the fear to overcome you. Just start the planning on how you’ll implement the project! Whether you need to rethink your PCI compliance program, classify company risks to mitigate, apply new technology into your AML, or any other compliance project, all you need is to ensure that the project goes through the following three phases:

Plan. Do. Deliver

Never start any project before you plan adequately! If you skip this phase, you’ll have difficulties delivering the project in time which will compromise your competency and integrity.

It’s advisable that the phrase “Plan. Do. Deliver” becomes your motivation.  If you start with this, the project will become more accessible to achieve. Ensure that the planning phase involves dividing the project into small but achievable milestones. The small wins that you get throughout the implementation phase will give you the drive to continue with the project.

Where to Start

Planning demands undivided attention! You will require to be highly creative to develop a feasible plan that’s achievable within the given time as well as the tight budget. You’ll have to create mechanisms that will alert you whenever a section of the project is not progressing as anticipated.

If you plan your project well, you will have an easy time implementing the execution and reporting phases of the project. In most cases, your planning process should account for approximately 35% for the total time allocated for the project. Do not compromise on this!

Common Themes

When you’re planning for a compliance project, you’ll observe the following themes:

• Resources. This is the primary theme for any compliance project. You’ll have to answer some pertinent questions including; what time is required to complete the project? What Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) will the project need? Does it need approvals for SMEs to participate in the project? How will you handle sensitive compliance data? Do you use secure authorizations for access to private data?
• Contact Project Stakeholders. You’ll need to communicate with the stakeholders to ensure that you understand all the dynamics of the project. Establish whether there are conflicting initiatives, blackout periods, or any other factor that may hinder the implementation phase of the project.
• Project Scoping. Do not expect to do everything in a single day! Instead, pick one project at a time and concentrate on it optimally. Ensure that you exhaustively involve the management to guarantee the availability of the resources as well as all the stakeholders required for the successful completion of the project.
• Prioritizing the Project. Once you determine the scope of the project, you’ll need to prioritize it. Ensure that you allocate the available resources on the most crucial parts of the project. Also, make early appointments with all the stakeholders to allow flawless communication and coordination.
• Initial Data Requests. You should identify the data that you require for the project. Identify the individuals/ departments that can provide the necessary data as well as the time needed to obtain it. If you fail to devise an effective data request method, it’ll lead to delay and confusion towards the end of the project.

These themes may appear invisible at the beginning of the project, but you should never ignore them. Instead, you should identify them as deliverables in your project to ensure that you’re not forced to halt the project due to lack of data, or unavailability of a stakeholder, or any other avoidable reason.

Whenever you accomplish each of the tasks, they become small achievements that will build up into the overall success of the project.

Scoping Your Compliance Management

When you start compliance management planning, you should never be overwhelmed by the demands of the assignment. Instead, you should start the planning process. Ensure that you spend approximately 35% of your time making plans since this will directly determine the success of your project.  Ensuring that you understand the dynamics of the assignment by engaging all the stakeholders will protect you from disappointments. During the implementation phase, you should ensure that you set achievable milestones. You should celebrate each small win and allow your employees to take credit for it. That way, they’ll be motivated which will lead to successful completion of the project.

Author Bio

Ken Lynch is an enterprise software startup veteran, who has always been fascinated about what drives workers to work and how to make work more engaging. Ken founded Reciprocity to pursue just that. He has propelled Reciprocity’s success with this mission-based goal of engaging employees with the governance, risk, and compliance goals of their company in order to create more socially minded corporate citizens. Ken earned his BS in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from MIT.  Learn more at ReciprocityLabs.com.