Rightsizing Your GRC Processes

When considering the chaos of modern business, it’s important to rightsize your governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) processes to your immediate needs, but also forecast for future growth and maturity.

Organizations need to make decisions today that prevent the business from becoming over-burdened by a future state of departmentalized thinking, emerging risks, and compliance requirements. An inefficient, siloed GRC program doesn’t set the tone for operational success. To develop a roadmap that considers your institution’s current and future needs, factor in issues of time, change, and scale.

Evaluate Your GRC Processes and Needs

• What are the pain points? What challenges does your organization face? Where can you improve?
• Define success: Establish how to make operational requirements into a competitive advantage. Measure the current state of staff efficiency and determine what stakeholders need to make the organization more agile across all GRC management areas.
• Consider the advantages: The main reason to build a strong business case for GRC is to justify the investment. Analyze both the tangible and intangible costs and gains the company stands to achieve with a successful implementation.
• Develop a timeframe: Set reasonable time expectations around how long it takes to evaluate GRC solutions, implement a new system, and realize a return on the investment.
• Plan how you will manage change: Emphasize the cost of not addressing these pain points and make sure decision-makers at your organization understand that you know the risks and have a plan to steer clear of common mistakes in choosing and implementing GRC solutions. Managing constant change is crucial for a smooth implementation phase.

Taking actionable steps to develop robust GRC frameworks and processes through technology requires planning at every juncture. Take the time to understand whether a specific solution fits your organization and its operations:

• Have you considered all of your needs?
• Is the vendor stable?
• Is the solution scalable?
• Will there be vendor support as you scale?
• Can the solution integrate with the current systems you have in place?
• Is training needed?
• Does the solution meet cybersecurity standards?

After you’ve found the right solution with a vendor that will meet your needs and help mature your GRC processes, it’s time to enable your team to become successful with the platform. Managers need to ensure that the organization doesn’t develop operational silos and that your GRC program becomes a symbiotic relationship between your team, technology, and business objectives.