Agility means the ability to move, think and understand quickly. In business-scape, agility refers to adapting and making iterative changes to the systems. And, agile compliance means staying compliant even when the regulatory and risk landscape is continuously evolving in the corporate world. 

Agile compliance, to an extent, is akin to driving a car at night. The driver turns on the headlights to navigate the dark route. With the headlights on, only a few meters of the path lightens up at a time. However, as the car traverses further, a new swatch of the path lightens up. Repeating this process over and over again, the driver can cover hundreds of miles without any issues and even without any knowledge of what is coming up ahead. 

Similarly, agile compliance assists businesses in predicting potentially hazardous changes sooner and, as a result, more precisely predicts compliance program specifications. Instead of one complete compliance (ref: waterfall compliance diagram below), agile compliance takes the cumulative delivery with multiple iterations, as per the changing business landscape.

Image via Infosys (No copyrights intended). 

It makes a lot of sense, right? This article will see why businesses should adapt to agile compliance and how they can do that?  

Why Is It Important to Implement Agile Compliance?

Compliance agility is more than just being robust; it’s the ability to maintain compliance in the face of constant change, with risks and uncertainty coming from all sides.

If resilience is defined as the ability to recover quickly from a traumatic situation, then agile compliance is the capacity to recognize what is coming at you, such as monitoring upcoming regulations and hazards and preparing the organization to navigate the environment while remaining compliant.

Four Important Areas Necessitate Compliance Agility

Four critical areas requiring compliance agility are as follows:

1) Strategic plan for compliance

Your compliance and ethical, strategic plan is the first step toward becoming agile. However, you can’t follow something that isn’t pre-defined. Therefore, each organization must clearly define compliance with a central point of contact in charge of monitoring and reporting compliance.

Compliance covers a wide range of topics (e.g., legal, accounting, IT, human resources, environmental, and health and safety name a few). As a result, a clear charter for cross-departmental compliance is critical. Also essential is an ethics committee charged with overseeing overall compliance processes and reporting across different activities.

2) Processes for reporting compliance

Organizations must create processes with workflow and compliance tasks to govern and monitor them continuously. They should explicitly describe metrics, information required, when and how to collect data, reporting to be delivered, and to whom, both internally and externally.

This procedure begins with identifying compliance-related risks and metrics required for compliance monitoring and reporting. Next comes determining where and how this information is collected and assigning planned duties for gathering and compiling this data for reporting. 

The reports like – policy management, communication, attestation, training, whistleblowing, incident reporting, investigations, and case management are evaluated, improved, and distributed to the appropriate internal and external stakeholders. 

3) Information architecture for compliance

Compliance reporting necessitates a strong compliance information architecture that separates and defines the level of detail required for each area of compliance risks and duties.

For continuous monitoring, the organization should define clear and actionable compliance key performance indicators (KPIs) and key risk indicators (KRIs) for each element of compliance reporting.

4) Technology architecture for compliance

The strategic compliance plan, processes, and information architecture are automated by a robust compliance technology architecture, assuring accurate and timely compliance.

This allows compliance accountability and duty structures to be established through specified workflow and tasks, ensuring that nothing is overlooked. 

It streamlines the compliance-reporting process by saving hundreds of hours spent manually reconciling and averaging data in mountains of papers, spreadsheets, and emails for compliance reporting and assessments.

How to Maintain Agile Compliance?

Most people consider compliance to be a difficult and time-consuming chore. And, to be honest, numerous laws must be followed, particularly in the construction industry. However, being compliant becomes much easier with proper preparation and computerized building compliance checklists.

We use cutting-edge technology at Pulse to better handle all of your safety compliances. We help you negotiate this due-diligence maze with our intelligent compliance checklists with bespoke templates and in-built logic, so you may emerge safe, sound and compliant on the other side.

To obtain access to our holistically designed agile compliance checklists, sign up for a free trial of Pulse Pro now.