Compliance gets in the way of innovation… how many times do you hear that?!
The truth is that this statement reveals fundamental issues with your product development. 5 root causes I see from this statement are:
- Ways of working between your Product and Compliance teams are fractured
- Your Compliance teams do not understand your product and commercial drivers
- Your Product teams do not value your compliance obligations
- There is a lack of awareness and understanding of your compliance obligations
- You do not make it easy to innovate compliantly
There is a natural push-pull relationship between innovative Product teams and Compliance. If your Product teams are not pushing boundaries then they cannot be competitive in the market. If your Compliance teams are not embedding compliance standards into the backbone of your organisation, then your worst-case compliance risks can materialise.
My experience is in the data protection and AI space. Based on these experiences, here are the ways I have found best to ensure you can innovate compliantly:
Be honest, get aligned
Understand each other’s drivers. Product wants to innovate; Compliance wants to stay the right side of regulation. How you achieve both is the recipe for success.
In the ideation phase it is common to have a half-baked idea. Agile teams work together rapidly to develop concepts to a point where they are market ready. Get in the room together and whiteboard!
Compliance teams need to have a mindset of “how can I say yes?” to allow development to move forward. For example, Data protection regulations do not say “no”, they say “if you want to do ‘X’ you need to do ‘Y’”. If you refuse to do ‘Y’ then it is a “no”. Give guidance that enables you to say “yes”. Ensure Product teams implement the correct controls.
For Product teams, compliance controls are non-negotiable. Your risk appetite will guide your decision making but teams must have a compliance-first mindset. Product teams must respect this approach and incorporate this into the Product development lifecycle.
Not implementing compliance standards because they add to your workload is not an excuse. If you are not implementing compliance controls, your product is not market ready.
Make it easy
There are often additional steps you have to take to ensure compliance with standards. Doing this in a way that minimises operational overheads is more of an art than a science.
Training takes time, but pays dividends. You do not need your teams to be experts in your area of compliance but they need to know the basics at least.
A compliance process needs feedback and input from the people who are actually following the process. Excessively bureaucratic processes are daunting to most innovative teams, no matter how appropriate they are. Make your Product team’s life as easy as possible.
When your innovation machine is working effectively everything should operate with ease. The people are in the right places, advice is being given at the right stages of the development lifecycle, and controls are embedded. To get to this point you need to align with your innovation culture and enhance ways of working.
Feedback loop
Do you tell Compliance teams when your product has gone live? Do Compliance give feedback on how well controls have been implemented?
If the answer to these questions is no, then you haven’t closed the loop. Innovative organisations move at pace, but there should always be time for a debrief.
If everything has gone well, that is 5 minutes spent saying good job to everyone involved. If things have not gone well, that is an opportunity to learn some lessons. Make time to highlight areas for improvement and follow through on actions that can be made to your processes.
Things like timely communication, relevant advice, and understanding the product brief are broad categories of feedback that should be reflected on.
Your innovation culture KPIs should measure how quickly you can go from ideation to production compliantly and measure how well the teams work together.
Want help innovating compliantly in your organisation?
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