As October arrives, many regulatory and compliance teams face two competing demands. Year-end deadlines are adding to an already heavy workload, while the annual planning cycle requires leaders to set priorities for the first quarter.

According to ACA Group, the usual answer is to protect the plan by asking staff to give a little more. That can work for a short time. When the work is sensitive, time-critical or likely to need reworking, however, it rarely holds up for long.

The issue is not just whether a team is busy. It is whether the team’s current capacity fits the type of work ahead. A queue of routine tasks can usually be ranked and worked through. A regulatory examination, a remediation programme, a policy overhaul, a transaction or a long absence is different. Each of these creates work that needs experienced judgement, steady momentum and clear ownership straight away.

There are four signals that a capacity gap may be forming. The first is when work stalls because the same senior people have to sign off every material decision. The second is when a team must choose between forward-looking planning and urgent remediation, rather than making progress on both.

The third is when temporary gaps are covered informally, with nobody clearly responsible for the result. The fourth is when the Q1 plan assumes the current workload will simply fade away, even though there is no solid reason to expect it to.

None of these signals automatically means a firm needs to hire permanently.

Source link