Cut over to BAU and Red Panda reflexes

Cutover to BAU. The Red Panda has one of the best startle reflexes in the animal kingdom. A close second might be bank middle management responding to reg change projects closing out.

Why this should come as a surprise in the face of comms plans handover meetings etc. I’m not sure, but it may have something to do with being distracted, stressed, underfunded and under resourced to some degree. That last bit tends to be pretty evident as our teams try to extract themselves and handover to line positions and extensions are hurriedly executed to ensure continuity.

While we appreciate the work and the implied vote of confidence in our people, this indicates that our clients may not designing these reg projects leveraging compliance by design. This also poses significant risk for ongoing compliance, as the IP of the reg change project has not been embedded in the business but sits with our team, who are contractors.

A bit of guidance around this process would be as follows:

• Anticipate, fund and resource the new workload
• Work with stakeholders, steering and in particularly line 1 and 2 risk to ensure full visibility
• Involve the business in the design of the new processes (and controls) to ensure they are fit for purpose to hand over
• Ensure that contractors work closely with BAU teams throughout. It can be a great development opportunity for a more junior staff member.

As always, we would be delighted to discuss further about how this might practically work within the constraints of each particular client situation.