Last year was an absolute killer for your compliance department. Years of ad hoc policy creation that barely kept you in compliance with local, state and federal guidelines finally slammed head-on into a major regulatory change that stretched your resources to the limit. The internal audit report painted a depressing picture, but fortunately senior management got on board and authorized the funds necessary to throw a whole bunch of resources at fixing the problem as quickly as possible. Every policy fire was promptly put out so that the ongoing report on policy “issues” could be shown to be getting shorter every day. Another victory for the policies and procedures task force.
Firefighting is not the answer
While you may feel some pride in the ability of your team to put out an impressive number of fires and to bring the company back from the brink of a compliance crisis yet again, that pride will have a remarkably short shelf life. Yes, you were able to convince senior management to make policy and procedure updates a top priority last year, but now that many of those same policies are up for renewal, your short-term focus on putting out fires has left you unsure precisely when those policies are due, or even where the final versions are. Following a strategy of ‘divide and conquer’ certainly made the overall project manageable in a very short time frame, but with so many people involved in putting out all of those fires, more things slipped through the cracks than you realized at the time.
Controlling the Chaos
There’s no doubt that the pressure to perform miracles under seemingly insurmountable odds can distort your vision of present circumstances, but without comprehensive policy management, short-term errors in the name of expediency will always come back to haunt you when those policies come up for renewal or update. Firefighters are heroes, but their response to every call-out is run by an experienced crew chief managing a team of qualified professionals according to a trained and tested action plan. No one gets to pitch-in for the good of the cause or go off plan on the basis of a perceived exception.
If you never want to fight another policy fire, let us show you how our sharepoint policy management software solution can provide one secure, access-controlled work portal and a robust template built on industry best practices to finally give you the tools you need to control the chaos. Schedule your no obligation demo now or download the whitepaper Achieving Efficient Policy Management
