Most GRC products offer complementary professional services along with their product license to support adoption into the customer’s landscape. The professional services team must have significant experience in governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) solution implementations, as well as business process automation, information security, data integration and migration, and end-user adoption. They should be required to perform following activities:
- Requirements Analysis
- Project Planning
- Process Design & Automation
- Access Control & Security
- Change Management
- Legacy Data Migration
- Custom Integrations
- Testing & Roll-Out
- Solution Documentation
Customers and their teams don’t have the time or bandwidth to run AND configure the platform. That’s where a strong professional services team steps in to guarantee a smooth, on-time delivery. Successful GRC implementations balance the responsibility of respecting a client’s cultural and organizational context when selecting the right implementation approach, while also considering the essential implementation success factors.
In my experience, I’ve seen some customers who have proactively anticipated the platform’s use in their environment and have even aligned a separate team to assist the platform internally. Surprisingly, this level of planning is very rare. The majority of customers have too much on their plates, and while they need the implementation, they don’t have the bandwidth or structure to plan well. These implementations require a strong professional services team that understands the customer environment, takes charge of the implementation, and goes above and beyond to install and configure the product.
In recent studies of top GRC vendors, poor professional services are a significant contributing factor to vendors’ awful customer satisfaction scores. In fact, when I talk to prospective customers, the number-one reason they give me for being unhappy with their current vendor is unsatisfactory professional services.
While all the previously listed responsibilities are essential for reaching success, well-designed technology and a strong front-facing team of experts will have the most significant impact on a project’s effectiveness. Teams with experience in successfully deploying GRC/integrated risk management platforms with varying project sizes and business complexities can adjust to customer needs and environment more quickly than others. A professional services team’s goal should be helping customers and their end users use the product, and they should be flexible to accommodate requirements with the product’s roadmap. If you see this from your vendor, then you’re in good hands—but if you don’t, you aren’t getting the service you deserve.
The TruOps team has more than 25 years of experience in the GRC space, and we’ve conducted implementations for organizations across the U.S. To learn more about what you should look for in a vendor’s professional services team, set up a demo with us.
