GOVERNANCE AND RISK

MANAGEMENT
 Governance, Risk Management and Compliance, also known as
GRC, is an umbrella term for the way organisations deal with
three areas that help them achieve their objectives.
The main purpose of GRC as a business practice is to create a
synchronized approach to these areas, avoiding repetition of tasks
and ensuring that the approaches used are effective and efficient.
 
This GRC guide is here to help you learn more about it and what
you can do to pplement the right processes in your business.
 governance risk management compliance GRC glossary graph
GOVERNANCE
 As the name suggests, this looks at the way companies are managed at the highest
levels, including the mechanisms,  processes and relations that allow for smooth
 allocation and understanding of the rights and responsibilities of the various decision
makers within the business.
Risk Management

 Every aspect of every business has the potential for risk, whether it’s a risk to
reputation, health & safety, financial security, etc. It’s nearly impossible to
avoid risks and certainly very difficult to do so whilst also achieving
successes, so risk management is the set of processes that identify, analyze
and respond appropriately to each potential risk.
Compliance

 Managing risks is one thing but it’s possible for multiple conflicting risks to
occur, leaving a business having to decide between minimizing the risk to
safety or minimizing the risk to profits, so it’s necessary to ensure that the
right decisions are always made. This is where compliance comes in, with
businesses needing to comply with various standards, laws, regulations, etc,
to avoid the penalties that result from non-compliance.
This GRC guide will tell you all you need to know about how your business can
benefit from bringing these three areas together under this one discipline.
Governance, Risk Management and
Compliance (GRC) Benefits
 An obvious and understandable reaction to the idea of bringing in yet more
corporate processes and procedures would be to wonder if this isn’t all just
yet more red tape and bureaucracy. However, GRC isn’t about adding to the
complexity of already-overstuffed processes, but to help condense and clarify
them to enable smooth running. But what are the main benefits of starting to
utilise GRC capabilities?
Cutting costs

 The integrated approach of GRC often brings real financial benefits as

unnecessary spending can be cut, while the clearer focus can help boost
revenue at the same time. The bigger the business, the more likely it is that
there will be plenty of areas where there is crossover and wastage, so a
process like this can transform efficiency.
Less duplicated work

 This is where most of the cost-cutting can be made, but it’s about more than
just the money. Having similar processes duplicated across a business is a
hugely inefficient way to operate and GRC can free up whole teams to work
on other projects.
Less negative impact

 Having too many procedures, especially ones that aren’t working in a logical
manner, can waste a lot of time for staff across a business. Tying everything
together in an GRC strategy cuts down on the paperwork and bureaucracy,
which will boost your staff’s productivity, not to mention their morale.
Greater information quality

 A more centralized and consistent approach to governance, risk management

and compliance helps to not only speed up the processes for gathering the
necessary information, but also improve the quality of what is gathered,
helping decisions be made more rapidly and with greater confidence.
More ability to repeat processes

 Another huge benefit is that processes can be standardised across these

areas, allowing for them to be repeated more easily and with greater
consistency and efficiency.
Reputation security

 Risk management and compliance are both essential parts of any attempts to
secure your business’s reputation, so it goes without saying that managing
these aspects more efficiently provides a more effective method of
reputation security.
Better allocation of resources

 Getting more information and understanding more about areas that are
duplicating work can help determine the most effective directions for your
business to go in.
No more silos

 Any large business has numerous issues with staff working in ‘silos’ where
information doesn’t flow in or out in a productive manner. GRC won’t completely
eradicate these issues, but it will certainly minimise their potential impact on key
areas.
GRC Guide: Implementation

You’ve identified the key players in your implementation of GRC into your business, but there’s
still a lot to consider before you can make the process a success. As part of our GRC Guide, we’ve
come up with five steps to take to make sure GRC is successfully installed at the heart of your
corporate strategies:
1.Define what you aim to achieve – If this sounds like an obvious step, it’s because it is. However,
it’s a step too often overlooked and one that can make all the difference between success and
failure.
2.Take stock of your current situation – You have clarified what GRC can mean to your
organisation, but another key step is to understand what is currently happening in the fields of
governance, risk management and compliance before you change anything.
 3.Pick a trial entry point – It is certainly possible to jump straight into rolling out GRC across
all of your business’s operations, and for smaller companies that is the only option really, but
the ideal scenario would be to pick a test subject.
 4.Demonstrate the benefits – With the approach above, there’s also the potential to gain some
early wins that can help with the internal communications aimed at winning buy-in from staff.
 5.Define what would represent success – This is one of the most important steps because
defining what would represent success is the way that you can demonstrate that the project
has been worthwhile.
 If you can work through these five steps and document the findings, you will
have most of the information you need to be able to move forwards with GRC
from a position of knowledge, research and authority. The process will always
be ongoing, meaning that there will always be more to learn, so the steps
from this GRC Guide can and should be repeated each time.
Top GRC Tips

 When it comes to implementing a GRC strategy or starting to use related tools and processes, there
are many potential pitfalls, so here are some top GRC guide tips on what to expect and some
lessons learned from businesses who have been down that road already:
 Do your research – Make sure you understand what you are buying if you are purchasing a product to
manage GRC, because if it doesn’t completely do what you are expecting of it, you will be wasting
money and creating extra work for yourselves doing something that is meant to minimize
expenditure and workload bloat.
 Take an iterative approach – Good advice for any major corporate strategy change, it applies just
as well with GRC. There is no way to get it 100% right the first time out as there are too many
factors and stakeholders involved, opening up the likelihood of needing to revise and revisit aspects
over and over again. So it’s best to plan ahead for this, especially given the nature of risk
management and compliance, both of which need to be monitored and revisited on a regular basis
as a matter of course.
 Work collaboratively – The project team for GRC implementation needs to be
a diverse one in terms of representing all of the various roles mentioned
above, otherwise the decisions made will not be representative and may not
achieve everything they are intended to achieve.
 Communicate – As previously mentioned in this GRC Guide, good
communication across the business is critical to avoid colleagues
misunderstanding the nature of GRC and what it is being brought in to
achieve.
 Prepare and provide the right resources – Another potential issue could be
that the GRC solution is seen as an easy win when it comes to cutting costs
and so the right financial and staffing resources aren’t put into place to
manage it at the early stages.