How to Get Next-level Performance from Your Compliance Engagements

One of the difficult parts about managing compliance — especially if you’re doing it manually — is the notion of accountability for the personnel who orchestrate and provision evidence. There’s just so much to track, so many people involved, multiple steps in your workflow, and so many moving parts. It becomes astronomically difficult to keep track of your engagement’s status.

As the deadline approaches, the heat turns up. Generally speaking, people get defensive and start playing the CYA game. Fingers get pointed and blame gets shifted. Bob thought this task was Sarah’s responsibility. Emily swears she completed that task last week. Nobody told Mary this other task was even assigned to her.

Deliverables get thrown hastily over the wall just for the sake of saying they were completed at the time of the status update, only to be rejected and placed back in people’s laps all over again.

Not only is it nearly impossible to keep people accountable for their tasks, it’s difficult to evaluate their performance. When the system’s being held together with bubble gum and duct tape, how do you hold your people accountable?

Complete Visibility Gives You Unmatched Accountability

The beauty of TCT Portal is that it’s like a clear plane of glass. The compliance management tool gives you complete visibility into everything that’s going on — live, in real time, with just a glance.

That clear plane of glass also provides unmatched accountability, with teeth. It’s a game-changer that elevates your team’s productivity, eliminates excuses, and provides black-and-white data when conducting performance reviews.

Better yet, this visibility is an enablement tool that helps the various members of your team to be successful on the engagement and not feel like they’re being backed into a corner.

Compliance managers who use TCT have an incredibly powerful tool in their hands to leverage the compliance system of their dreams. Remember that the TCT Portal was built by compliance practitioners FOR compliance practitioners.

Automated Accountability

With TCT Portal, everyone always knows exactly who has what and what needs to be done. Each item is assigned to a specific person and it’s easy to see at a glance. But just to be sure nothing slips through the cracks, the compliance software sends out an email each morning to remind each person of their remaining items in hand.

So there’s no excuse for not knowing you had to do something, and there’s no question who has what items. You should never hear, “I thought Mary had that one” again.

There’s nowhere to hide when you’re using TCT Portal. The notion of “I thought I sent that” or “I delivered that three days ago” or “I didn’t know I had to do that” — all of that typical B.S. that goes on in an engagement instantly evaporates.

All you have to do is look at the system, and it only takes a couple seconds to do that.

Performance Tracking

Not only does TCT Portal give complete visibility to what’s going on, it also highlights when someone isn’t doing their job. You get the benefit of the visibility and insights without all the B.S., as well as the ability to identify where you have personnel issues to resolve.

For example:

• Fred isn’t submitting evidence on time.
• Velma’s work consistently gets rejected by QA and sent back.
• Daphne has a pattern of reassigning her tasks to other people at the last second.

TCT Portal also lets you review someone’s productivity over current and past engagements. Have they been turning in assignments on time, or are they chronically late? How often were items rejected and sent back to them?

If you need to review an employee’s performance over a period of time, you can go back and see how well they were doing — what they struggled with, where they needed to improve, and where they excelled.

When you can identify the trends of your team members’ performance over time, you can address issues earlier and more fully. As a result, the overall throughput and efficiency on a compliance engagement goes up by magnitudes.

And you enjoy your job more.

Be a Better Boss

Want better insights to understand the needs of your direct reports? Mid-level managers in various departments can quickly and easily filter the data to gain greater clarity:

• What items are outstanding in my department?
• Which of my direct reports are overloaded with responsibilities?
• For any heavily loaded personnel, do I need to alter their present priorities to enable them to be successful?
• Is my department on track — and if not, where are we behind?
• What’s the status of each person in my department?

Go to the history of each individual item or each certification. Search for groups, people, etc. See which of your team members actually did anything this week.

Now you can identify potential problems. Maybe the issue isn’t that Fred isn’t performing to expectations — maybe he’s just overloaded with too many competing priorities. Looking at TCT Portal, you can see he has twice as many tasks as anyone else on the team and has five other top priorities for the business aside from his compliance assignments. No wonder he’s falling behind.

TCT Portal allows you to see what reality is, and then to contemplate why. It may very well be that you have employees that aren’t performing — but it could also be that managers need to improve their planning.

Or, you might discover that your team knocks it out of the park every year, but only because 20 percent of your people are doing 80 percent of the work and they’re carrying the team on their backs.

Related: Avoid the Common Mistakes New Compliance Managers Make

Keep Your Vendors Accountable

TCT Portal helps you keep your vendors, Service Providers, and Assessors accountable too. If your vendor goes radio silent or drops off the face of the earth, you can still track their activities and send reminders. You don’t have to wonder if they’re working on your engagement, because you’ll see it directly in TCT Portal.

In the past, personnel would have all sorts of ways to hide, defray, postpone, delay accountability. With TCT Portal, that opportunity is just not afforded to anyone.

Related: How to Tell if Your Vendors Are a Weak Link in Your Security

Executive Reporting

When reporting to upper management, it’s human nature to inflate the success of a project and to minimize issues. If someone reports that everything is on track and moving smoothly, how do executives know that’s actually the case?

Executive leadership doesn’t need the nitty-gritty details, but they do often care about overall progress. In that case, they can view status information at a high level to see if your engagement is on track.

Optimize Your Compliance Engagements

Security and compliance engagements require tremendous resources and time. In today’s business environment, you can’t afford to have a compliance engagement that doesn’t live up to expectations. TCT Portal gives complete visibility to spot the issues that need attention and to keep your personnel accountable.

The potential this provides for optimizing your team is almost limitless. And it sets you up to reap some serious productivity and cost savings benefits as well.

Ready to see what TCT Portal can do for your organization? Get a personalized demo!