The Pareto Principle, which states that 80% of the results are generated from 20% of the efforts certainly applies to regulatory change management. Regulatory experts spend an inordinate amount of time doing work that is a necessary prerequisite to their work and much less time on the actual work at hand. The good news is that it is possible to eliminate a lot of the menial tasks that take up time to allow the experts to focus on change management.

Identifying the 80% that doesn’t help the organization

If only 20% of efforts are providing 80% of the results, then what are the other 80% efforts which are only responsible for 20% of the results? That is the first question that we need to answer when we set out to increase the productivity of the regulatory change experts within the organization. A close look at the way people in the regulatory, risk, and compliance departments spend their labor hours provides a clear answer – administrative tasks are to blame.

An investigation into how these departments operate reveals, why administrative tasks end up taking so much time. The core purpose of a regulatory change manager is to ensure that their organization complies with regulations even if the government changes them, and that it can implement the required changes without causing any business process disruptions or without derailing the organization’s strategy.

Regulatory change management teams end up increasing their productivity exponentially once they are provided regulatory change management solutions (commonly referred to as Regtech). Share on X

The prerequisites of regulatory work

The problem is that in order to perform their core function, regulatory experts must first develop the framework and go on a fact-finding mission. They must first find out what regulations have changed. Once they know the changes, they must then discover all the business processes, policies, and documents that are affected by the regulatory change. This is a lot of work and the important thing to remember here is that the regulatory experts aren’t managing change at this point – they are still trying to find out what has changed and how it may affect the organization.

This whole process is the 80% of efforts that gives you merely 20% of the results – once this work is done, the experts can move on to the actual work, which constitutes the last 20% of efforts which give 80% of the results. The good news is that we can overcome this productivity obstacle once we identify the root cause of the time sinks.

Do our regulatory experts have the right regulatory change management tools?

Whenever any organization gives an objective to a team, they must focus to provide them the right tools. These tools vary depending on the nature of the job. If we are talking about janitors, then the organization ensures that they have the right cleaning supplies. Construction crews need their specialized construction tools. CEOs have their own tools too – dashboards, company vehicles, an office where clients can be met with, and so on. Each job role has various tools that help them do their job easily. The problem is that regulatory experts seldom get any specialized tools.

We are always surprised by how many regulatory, risk, and compliance departments end up making their own solutions out of general-purpose software applications. Most teams end up becoming Dr. Frankenstein, using Microsoft Word and Excel in ways they weren’t intended to be used. This is like giving an electrician a knife instead of a screwdriver and expecting them to work efficiently. Sure, they will be able to figure out a way to stick the knife in a position that allows them to uncork the screw, but their efficiency level will be exponentially lower.

Microsoft’s productivity suite (Outlook, Excel, Word, and more) is a fantastic productivity solution but it has no tools for regulatory experts, because it wasn’t designed for regulatory experts. That is why a lot of work they do is administrative – they have to replicate the function of specialized regulatory tools manually before they can focus on the core function of their job.


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Productivity when regulatory change managers have the right tools in their arsenal

Regulatory change management teams end up increasing their productivity exponentially once they are provided regulatory change management solutions (commonly referred to as Regtech). Regtech tools are made with the express purpose of streamlining and automating regulatory and compliance workflows. They introduce robotic process automation to regulatory tasks and also centralize data gathering as well as analysis, which ends up significantly reducing the time regulatory experts must spend on administrative tasks.

Some of the features available in Regtech solutions are impossible to replicate manually. These solutions have notifications and alerts about regulatory changes. They also have risk maps, which link together regulations to risks and to the processes and policies driving those risks. This means that when a regulatory change occurs, the solution can immediately detect not just what changed, but also which policy/document/process needs to be changed, and also what effect the change has on organizational risks.

The most profound change in productivity occurs because regulatory experts can now actually focus on the core function of their job. Since Regtech delivers them the information they need in the format they need, they can begin working on creating a change management strategy and implementing it straightaway.

Want to see how your organization will perform if it has dedicated Regtech tools? Get in touch with the 360factors’ team for a demo and trail of our Regulatory Change Management Solution.