A 5-step template for heads of compliance to craft an effective compliance strategy
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Compliance Strategy Template for Effective Planning
This year's top priority for compliance leaders is to improve the approach to managing third-party risks and the extended enterprise.
To achieve this, an effective compliance strategic plan that aligns your enterprise strategy with specific initiatives for your function is essential. When executed well, your compliance strategy should offer a clear roadmap to accomplish your business goals.
Download the Gartner Compliance Strategy Template and Toolkit to learn:
- The 5 activities that are key to an impactful compliance strategy
- Tools and frameworks needed to build a measurable compliance strategy
- How to capture and communicate your compliance strategy to stakeholders with a simple and visually impactful one-page template
More About the Compliance Strategy Template
The Gartner Compliance Strategy Template and Toolkit helps compliance leaders define the roadmap for executing the key actions required to meet compliance strategic goals in alignment to the enterprise business model and goals. Leaders can leverage this compliance strategy template to create and communicate a clear action plan that states where the compliance function currently is, where it needs to be, how to get there and how to measure progress.
Compliance Strategy FAQs
What is an effective Compliance Strategy?
A effective compliance strategy is a functional roadmap that assesses current resources, costs and budget and aligns them with the company’s mission and goals. It sets a plan to align with enterprise goals to grow and innovate, despite changing and often unpredictable business conditions. A compliance strategy sets priorities, manages trade-off decisions and ensure it continues to make critical investments to meet business needs.
What are the 5 key activities for an effective compliance strategy?
- Verify the business context. Confirm the enterprise mission and goals and make sure your employees know how they apply to their everyday work. Align your compliance goals for impact.
- Assess your compliance function’s ability to deliver on your goals and create a plan to fill the capability gaps that will slow your impact.
- Strategically manage compliance budgets to prioritize cost, budget and investment decisions to favor initiatives that will drive impact — and demote those that won’t.
- Decide how to measure your progress. Select measures and metrics that will demonstrate the progress you’re making against the commitments you’ve made.
- Document your strategy — ideally on just one page — to simply and clearly state where the compliance organization is, where it is going and how it will get to the future state.
Why should you use our Compliance Strategy Template & Toolkit?
The Gartner Compliance Strategy Template and Toolkit helps compliance leaders develop a multiyear department strategy and implement that strategy through identifying measurable annual targets. Working through this Tool will enable you to:
- Develop your strategic plan
- Identify key threats, challenges and drivers to address through the strategic plan
- Determine priority areas, goals and metrics that will address department and organizational challenges
- Prioritize initiatives and track implementation to fulfill your strategic goals
- Communicate the strategic plan across the department and organization
Develop an annual plan based on your multiyear strategy at the start of each year to make progress toward it. The initiatives you plan on an annual basis should contribute to the execution of the multiyear strategy. Annual planning can serve as a course corrector for your multiyear plan if necessary.