8 ways to ensure compliance in project management

Imagine this: your team launches a new AI-powered platform, and it’s a hit—until you discover it doesn’t comply with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Suddenly, you’re facing lawsuits, regulatory fines, and a wave of customer mistrust. Meanwhile, international markets flag the project for failing to meet GDPR standards, multiplying the issues.

This example is just one of many ways that non-compliance can derail a project, regardless of industry. In construction, it might mean halting work due to OSHA violations. In healthcare, it could mean fines for failing to adhere to HIPAA regulations. Compliance is a critical component of project management, ensuring that legal, ethical, and industry-specific standards are met throughout the project lifecycle.

For project managers, compliance can’t be treated as an afterthought—it must be an integral part of planning and execution. Compliance isn’t just about ticking boxes, though. It’s also about creating a roadmap that ensures your project meets legal, ethical, and organizational standards while achieving its goals.

Let’s explore why compliance matters, how to integrate it into your project management strategy, and how it can actually become a cornerstone of success rather than an obstacle.

What is project compliance?

Compliance plays an essential role in most aspects of business. It means upholding laws, standards, contracts, and rules and regulations that apply to your business. As such, project compliance means making sure all of a project’s internal and external processes meet this requirement.

Many responsibilities will apply to almost any type of business or project, like data-handling responsibilities. However, other compliance requirements are sector or role-specific, like the level of financial reporting importance for finance businesses or company CFOs in general.

The five forms of business compliance

Supporting compliance in project management means keeping a lot of plates spinning. This is because there are all kinds of ways compliance issues can pop up.

Ensuring project compliance across the board requires team collaboration, which means everyone needs to be aware of the different ways these issues can arise. There are five main compliance categories to consider:

• Contractual compliance: Honoring formal agreements with stakeholders. For example, a construction project finishing in the allotted time frame or a business paying its employees on time.
  
• Internal compliance: Rules and policies set by HR or leadership based on internal decisions. For example, project managers should be mindful of rules like overtime restrictions when pursuing their deadlines.
  
• Regulatory compliance: Adhering to laws and business regulations. These include conduct regulations like TCPA compliance, as well as data protection requirements or workplace health and safety.
  
• Quality compliance: Businesses have a duty of care to meet reasonable quality expectations for their products and services. Faulty products or services can fail to work or even pose risks to the user and need to be recalled.
  
• Ethics compliance: Ethics is less about complying with hard rules, but rather making decisions based on fairness and honesty to create an environment of trust.

The importance of compliance in project management

Staying compliant can feel like a minefield, but it’s vital to spend the time on getting it right. That’s as true for a tech company developing mind-mapping software as it is for a law firm representing its clients.

Ethical and legal project conduct

It’s crucial to stay on the right side of laws, regulations, and ethics when managing a project, as failure to do so can land your company in hot water. Let’s say your company uses inbound call centers, and leverages the information they collect for their marketing campaigns. You must handle and safeguard it in keeping with data protection laws, such as the CCPA in the US or the EU’s GDPR.

Even if compliance failures don’t violate regulations, they can present ethical failings that damage employee and consumer trust. For example, a project that generates a lot of waste or consumption may generate bad publicity with environmentally conscientious consumers.

Ensuring standards of quality and brand reputation

Speaking of consumer trust, staying compliant while meeting project goals is a vital form of protection for your brand. In a competitive market, it’s important to distinguish your business as trustworthy with high professional standards. Any problems affecting your project’s ability to meet consumer or client expectations must be dealt with efficiently.

Let’s say you’re a developer for an online mobile game, and your main project is to launch a major update. To ensure quality compliance in project management, you need a system in place for issue and bug tracking. New features might cause unexpected glitches, while new players brought in by marketing could overload your servers.

Common sources of compliance issues

One of the main reasons it’s important to have strategies for compliance in project management is that breaches can occur in a wide range of circumstances. It’s not always malicious but more often the result of simple human error. Common causes of non-compliance include:

• External or societal factors: Sadly, you can’t control everything that impacts your business. Market changes might change the priorities of your target customers like developments in IT infrastructure architecture rendering your platform obsolete.
  
• Poor workplace communication: Compliance issues may result from misunderstandings between colleagues, such as a failure to communicate guidelines during a critical project phase.
  
• A lack of compliance understanding: Quite often, non-compliance stems from ignorance, like a contact center worker giving out a customer’s personal data due to not understanding their data protection responsibilities.
  
• Resource limitations: Resource costs can be a major hurdle for project scalability. Exceeding your budget poses serious challenges for businesses trying to meet their obligations to stakeholders.
  
• Changes in project scope: Our initial plans often don’t survive outside of a vacuum. An announcement by a competitor or data uncovered while fact-finding can cause you to shift your objectives. If your people aren’t prepared, this can result in mistakes and compliance oversights.

Take the various ways companies use customer information for example. It’s not as simple as asking for permission. Even if someone voluntarily uses your customer feedback tools, you still have a responsibility to safeguard their data from theft or loss, which could result from most of the things on this list.

8 strategies for compliance in project management

As you can see, having a solid plan for compliance in project management must be a top priority. You can’t work professionally without a compliance framework, just like you wouldn’t manage a marketing team without a KPI for demand generation.

Now that’s clear, let’s go over some practical advice. Here are eight important tactics to help you achieve project success while meeting your various obligations.

1. Select clear language and visuals relating to compliance policies

If you’re struggling to ensure project compliance at work, it’s important to look for avoidable misunderstandings. Many industries have their share of jargon, and more detailed compliance procedures risk adding to an already overcrowded plate.

Consider how you can distinguish key terminology in your compliance policies. Let’s use your company’s data handling procedure as an example. It’s vital that you store data in the right place on your network, so it can be reviewed and protected with the appropriate level of encryption and access privilege.

Failure to effectively distinguish aspects like different areas in your network or various levels of encryption increases the likelihood of confusion and mishandling. That’s why clear, distinct terminology is so important.

You can even use a flowchart maker or screenshots of a mock-up of your network in onboarding and training materials for visuals to prevent employee error.

2. Plan for non-compliance issues

Policies for compliance in project management essentially highlight what should happen if everyone does everything right. That said, the real world is far from perfect. Mistakes and negligence do happen.

That’s why your policies should also include a roadmap for what to do in the face of potential compliance violations.

Let’s say your team uses a Kanban-style workflow system and someone accidentally posts sensitive information outside of confidential channels. Your response plan needs to cover:

• Damage mitigation solutions: such as removing leaked data and apologizing to affected stakeholders.
• HR-led disciplinary procedures: for responsible parties, such as employee review, suspension and/or termination.
• Policy review: in this case, what can be done to prevent future leaks of sensitive information on professional channels.

3. Provide employees with compliance training

To ensure total compliance during a project, everybody needs to be on the same page. Unfortunately, not every employee comes with formal compliance management experience. That’s why you need to take the initiative by training employees to understand your shared obligations.

This can be done through virtual CIPD courses, as well as in-person or video call workshops. However, you should also make sure to provide educational materials through employee portals or in onboarding materials so that staff can brush up on the specifics as needed.

4. Collect data on policy effectiveness

Don’t make the mistake of assuming your first attempt at compliance policy will be perfect. It’s important to monitor projects and the impacts your policies have on them. Poorly thought-out policies may unintentionally limit project success. Even mostly successful compliance procedures can still have blind spots you only notice in hindsight.

Keep studying and reviewing your compliance policies and how they impact your projects. Besides improving your approach, data-driven insights can really elevate the quality of your narrative report when you have to inform investors and other stakeholders.

5. Review the latest regulatory developments

Whether your company designs buildings for human habitation or online whiteboards for virtual collaboration, you’ll always be at the mercy of changes in regulation. Being caught midway through a project by a major regulatory development can spell disaster.

Let’s say you launch a project to promote your food franchise using temporary pop-up locations. You’ve got a budget, supply chain, set-up plan, and even locations picked out. Then a change in zoning restrictions or food service premises regulations renders the whole plan technically illegal.

At that point, you’re basically back to square one. That’s why it’s essential to keep an ear to the ground. Monitor prominent industry publications, legal developments in your area, and even rumblings on LinkedIn. It’s important to see major policy changes coming so that you can adjust project plans ahead of time.

6. Use compliance management tools and software

Some companies still rely on manual compliance management, but this can be incredibly time-consuming and open to human error. GRC (Governance, Risk, and Compliance) applications can streamline compliance work by automating key functions for your HR team.

You can even integrate GRC insights and policy specifications with other tools you might use. WBS software (Work Breakdown Structure) offers a visual deconstruction of a project’s processes and hierarchy.

You can use these visualizations to highlight key compliance responsibilities during the project lifecycle. This ensures that everyone in your organization remembers their necessary compliance contributions like project documentation and reviews, which is important to prevent missing data in your GRC timeline.

7. Conduct post-project reviews

It’s important not to assume project compliance just because your team met their objectives without issue. Post-project (or post-sprint, if you’re using agile methodology) reviews allow the team to reflect on their actions, what worked, and what could be improved.

Aside from the obvious productivity benefits, this allows you to evaluate the efficiency of compliance in project management processes, as well as any potential blind spots where unrecorded violations could have occurred.

One compliance responsibility is to keep stakeholders informed in a timely manner, and reviews are best done while memories of the project are fresh. So, post-project reviews must take into account compliance efficiency.

8. Use third-party vendors and assessors as needed

It’s more difficult to achieve scalability handling everything internally. If your business isn’t a software company, for example, it would be a much more significant investment to build and host your own cloud storage network.

That’s why so many companies rely on cloud networks and even use vendor tools for internal presentations and resources.

Of course, with any third party vendor, you need to make sure they adhere to appropriate compliance measures of their own, that they uphold your project management principles, and that their tools are compatible with your existing platform.

For truly impartial compliance in project management, it can also be worth turning to a third party for assessment. While internal audits can be effective, they sometimes run the risk of bias. A properly accredited external assessor will impartially rate your organizational and project compliance based on data-driven metrics and regulatory requirements.

Ensuring project compliance is a multi-faceted job

Compliance in project management is far from a simple responsibility. Data collection and protection compliance alone is such a massive job. Add in things like quality regulation, workplace health and safety, or internal policies, and it’s another order of magnitude altogether.

That’s why project compliance has to be a team effort. Your people need to be well-informed and positioned to be proactive. Giving people the knowledge and skills training is essential for instilling a company culture of compliance.

We’ve given you an idea of what to cover with your company’s project compliance strategies. Now, it’s up to you to implement them.

Author bio

Nicholas Cox is a global product marketing leader with over two decades of experience in audit and accounting, finance, and product marketing. He has held senior roles at OneStream Software, Oracle, and SAP SuccessFactors, driving go-to-market strategies, product innovation, and business development across EMEA and globally. Nick has extensive experience working with customers and partners and regularly writes and speaks on finance topics. You can find him on LinkedIn.