I was consulting on an engagement. The assessor on the project was mentoring a new assessor, but the new assessor hadn’t arrived, yet. He was having travel issues and ended up arriving on-site halfway through the engagement. Once he arrived, the junior assessor was quick to make comments and ask questions without first considering the […]
Your role as compliance assessor is to guide your clients through the journey of a compliance assessment. Every engagement takes your clients along a path that’s littered with stumbling stones, rabbit trails and uncharted territory. A maelstrom of chaos awaits, and your clients need a trail guide who can confidently and expertly lead them to […]
Software tools like spreadsheets, Word documents and project management programs inherently make compliance engagements more difficult, not easier. They aren’t designed to track compliance, they take more effort, and they cut into your profits. Assessment firms that use automated compliance management systems save time, increase profits and minimize frustrations.
As you walk into a compliance engagement with a new client, you’ve got everything orderly and planned out. Your deck of templates is ready to go and you’ve set up your drop zone for files. A beautiful Gantt chart maps out the entire compliance assessment, with milestones. The first day, you lay out the plan […]
Phoenix Financial Services was onboarding a client that required the company to certify as being PCI-compliant. The firm had been set up for PCI compliance for years, but they didn’t have the documentation and assessments that proved compliance. They expected the process to be rather straightforward, but the compliance demands quickly proved to be unwieldy. […]
I had dinner the other night with a couple of assessors. As we talked, they expressed their frustrations about their evidence submission process. Every time they go in to figure out the status of their clients’ submissions, they end up sinking hours into it. The glut of files waiting for them is impossible to manage […]
Some disasters you can see coming for miles, if you’re watching for them. Hurricanes. Wildfires. Compliance chaos. As a consultant, I’ve witnessed my fair share of compliance disasters. I’ve seen client teams that were driven not by a desire to improve their security through compliance, but merely to satisfy a checkbox for their customers. The […]
Online Business Systems (Online) was wasting hundreds of man-hours each year on compliance engagements, and they struggled to find a smooth workflow for their assessments. Every engagement was too complicated, and they labored to coordinate efforts internally and with clients. Until they found TCT Portal. Our latest case study reveals the frustrating challenges of a […]
As mountaineering tourism becomes more popular, novice climbers are setting out to conquer the world’s highest summits. Unfortunately, they are often ill-prepared and ill-equipped for the challenge, and the results can be tragic. The compliance realm may not be as physically risky as climbing Mount Everest is, but there are real risks to your assessment […]