Four Mistakes to avoid while implementing Policy Management

A holistic GRC management is incomplete without policy management. In an ideal world, policies guide an organization to follow the rules and regulations, prepare for internal and external audits, and finally keep the organizations away from risks. However, the reality seems to be different. Many of the organizations seem to have only very basic policy management system in place. It can cause severe consequences as it leaves you at the risk for financial losses, security breaches, and overlook the improvement initiatives.

Policy management is a process with regular adjustments that requires setting your policies and procedures. Setting them is not the be-all-and-end-all. Putting them into place, communicating them across the organization, and enforcing their take-up and compliance are equally important.

Avoid These Mistakes While Implementing Policy Management

Let’s see the major risks companies can face not implementing a full-blown policy management system, and how to avoid them.

Mistake #1- Approval Processes Hurting Your Business? Automate It

Is the policy document approved? Who approved it? Are we distributing the approved version of the policy to employees? These are some of the common questions that we hear in organizations. Policies usually require multi-level approvals. There could be occurrences that the organizations’ performance improvement initiatives can get delayed due to a missed approval.

VComply helps you set up workflows for multi-level approvals. Instead of manually sending a policy and wait at every turn for a manager to approve a policy and then send it to another level for approval, you can automate the whole approval process and configure parallel, round-robin, or sequential level of approval.

Mistake #2-Policies Everywhere? Centralize It

The lack of having a central repository can create chaos when it comes to working with multiple policies. The employees find it difficult to choose which version of the policy is to be followed in a manual set up. VComply encourages efficient policy management as all the policies are centrally located, saving employees’ time retrieving the policy. VComply’s policy portal helps ensure that your organization complies with laws and regulations, and helps share policies with your stakeholders for attestation or reference.

Mistake #3-Disparate and Disconnected Systems for Compliance, Risk and Policy Management? Link Them

Organizations using disparate and disconnected systems for risk, compliance and policy management miss the integrated system’s benefits. Compliance, Risks management, and Policy management share interrelated tasks and common objectives. Combining these processes, and establishing transparency and accountability requires an integrated and linked system. 

VComply’s GRC management is tightly coupled with policy management and helps implement proactive and risk-based policy management. It saves time, effort and money – and streamline the efforts required for managing risks, compliance, and policy management.

Mistake #4-Role-based Access Control

Every policy management workflow should define the policy owner and with whom the policy is intended to be shared and not. VComply’s Workflow Management System should allow you to customize what each user can see and edit. It enables business-level control of access rights by using roles to match user permissions to the organization

A comprehensive policy management tool can alleviate the difficulties in creating and implementing policies. Cloud-based solutions like VComply’s Policy Management Software give you a powerful way to create, modify, distribute, and test policies. For instance, with VComply, you can create questionnaires to gauge the effectiveness of a policy, assign privileges to give proper access, have a convenient audit trail, get real-time alerts, and more. Policy is a crucial component of GRC and VComply offers a range of tools for governance, risk, and compliance management.

Having considered what a policy management process looks like and some reasons to invest in a policy management solution, deliberate on how to better govern your organization. Remember, the cost of bad policy management may far exceed that of investing in a policy management solution. So, when the time is right, do not think twice about using a smart software to empower your efforts!