Regardless of your industry, regulation changes are inevitable. Major shifts in regulatory compliance can expose a company’s technical debt and business process inefficiencies, making them especially vulnerable during the transition period.
In many cases, companies are not adept at taking on large-scale program initiatives that require coordination across all business units. Standard project management techniques, including detailed project schedules, RAID logs, and status reports, could potentially help mitigate challenges related to changing systems and processes. But what organizations really need is skillful, structured, and measured leadership that drives end-to-end preparedness and execution. Robust Concept to Delivery (C2D) can help companies respond proactively to regulatory amendments with resilience and confidence.
The right approach to C2D fosters cross-organizational collaboration, bringing clarity to end-user expectations for informed, prioritized decision-making around new system requirements. Here’s how organizations can apply this method to meet new regulatory compliance requirements.
How Do Organizations Adapt to Regulatory Changes?
A regulatory mandate such as the one facing financial institutions tied to LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate) can require immense process and technology overhauls. LIBOR has been the predominant forward-looking rate calculation globally but was phased out at the end of 2021 and will be non-existent come June of 2023. It is estimated that major banks will spend more than $100 million transitioning away from LIBOR.
This often applies in other industries where compliance requirements are evolving, such as in the case of the Cures Act regulations in the healthcare sector. Companies facing regulatory changes must re-evaluate a host of Business and IT fundamentals, including:
- Manual processes across teams
- Legacy and duplicative systems
- Outdated data warehousing
- Technical debt, both new and existing
If this isn’t daunting enough, these challenges need to be tackled in addition to meeting the new regulatory mandates and keeping everyday business functions afloat. Leveraging a sound Concept to Delivery approach can give companies a lifesaving buoy.
The Part Concept to Delivery Has to Play
Concept to Delivery can help organizations pave a holistic path towards successful regulation adoption. There are many different elements (known as sub-capabilities) within C2D, all of which play an important role in helping companies adjust to regulatory changes. But there are two especially critical aspects of this best practice when it comes to complying with and adapting to compliance changes: Strategic Planning and Stakeholder Alignment.
Strategic Planning helps organizations strike a balance between meeting new compliance requirements and managing innovative, goal-driven projects. During the Strategic Planning phase, key players evaluate existing infrastructure — with a focus on automating manual processes and replacing legacy systems — while keeping stakeholder requirements and organization-wide objectives in mind.
Stakeholder Alignment is crucial to reducing conflict during the decision-making process. By ensuring all impacted parties are empowered to communicate their thoughts and opinions, organizations can incorporate process changes into the existing company culture without compromising collaboration across business units. However, it can be easy to get swept up in everyone’s individual desires.
During regulatory compliance initiatives, organizations often form a long Wish List. With all the money being thrown at the issue, it’s no surprise that people want their long-awaited personal objectives fulfilled — but that simply isn’t possible for any enterprise. By leveraging Concept to Delivery, organizations can put strategic objectives and priorities before personal interests while aligning key stakeholder requirements and maintaining business as usual (BAU).
Using Concept to Delivery to Optimize Business Processes
As mentioned, LIBOR is a change that has a vast impact within the financial industry. More than sixty nations are represented by the approximately 17 banks contributing to the fixing of USD LIBOR.
Fraudulent activity and collusion identified within LIBOR were discovered in 2012, which is estimated to have cost US states, counties, and local governments at least $6 billion. By June of 2023, LIBOR will be non-existent and replaced with an alternative reference rate such as the Secured Overnight Financing Rate (SOFR).
Transitioning from LIBOR requires deliberate and focused action, and organizations must align their everyday activities with meeting new rate obligations. This is an extensive and difficult task that forces organizations (and every individual within them) to undergo huge shifts in a very short timeframe. LIBOR’s removal has also spurred significant manual operational processes and caused technical debt, with which many organizations are still struggling.
SEI helped a leading global asset management company respond to LIBOR quickly, efficiently, and without compromising BAU. This firm had to address the LIBOR regulation changes along with a large volume of technical debt from other prior efforts. Paramount to this was the disconnection of a duplicative accounting system, as well as the routing of all processing through a replacement system. SEI also helped decommission several reporting modules, consolidate a data warehouse, and implement various process flow adjustments.
Along with initial cutover activities, SEI leveraged C2D business process optimization to maintain the firm’s BAU activity. We optimized their business processes by streamlining project charters, collecting lessons learned through retrospectives, providing clarity around roles and responsibilities, and ensuring effective change management protocols.
Conquer Compliance with Concept to Delivery
SEI has extensive experience helping organizations prepare for, comply with, and adjust to regulatory shifts. Our consultants empower companies with the tools necessary to identify business requirements, clarify product roadmaps, and refine ideas until they become elegant solutions.
By leveraging innovative and people-centric C2D, our talented consultants enable organizations to support candid, open communication and cross-functional collaboration — fueling holistic decision-making that breaks down silos and brings people together. We can also facilitate the creation of data-driven strategies that hold everyone accountable to timelines, deliverables, and solution objectives. And after implementation is complete, we can continue to provide coaching and advice to encourage long-lasting results.
With the SEI approach to Concept to Delivery, organizations can meet new compliance standards without compromising business growth. Get in touch to continue the C2D conversation!
