Improving the usability of  GRC Issue management

My role

My role included

• stakeholder management,

• extracting user requirements from product vision and user research,

• understanding user requirements, 

• formulating a strategy for design,

• incorporation of prioritised requirements into the design,

• discussing tradeoffs with PM’s, engineering team and come to a consensus on a path to move forward.

What is Issue management?

Issue Management inthe GRC world is the process of tracking problems identified in audits, risks, or controls and ensuring they are resolved with clear ownership, actions, and evidence.

Problem

Organizations face a constant stream of issues originating from Audits, Compliance reviews, Risk assessments, and Regulatory changes. To maintain Market Leadership, enterprises need an integrated way to manage these issues across different domains. The goal of this project is to simplify and automate the Issue management processes using an AI-powered, intuitive solution.

Limitations of the current product

• Single issue type structure (fixed form, limited flexibility)

• Linear uniform workflow (not adapting to criticality or business context)

• Limited multi-entity management

• Basic action plan management (seperate, not deeply integrated into issue lifecycle)

• No approval workflows

• Cluttered experience

• No proper guidance; unintuitive

• No predictive analytics for emerging issue trends

"We have heavily customised issue management because it does not cater to our needs."

Wells Fargo

Servicenow Issue management customer

User archetypes

Targeted personas

We are solving for several key roles across an organisation.

Industry gaps

Current Gaps:

• No Smart Detection: Absence of OOTB detection for duplicate issues, possible owners, previously resolved similar issues.

• Rigid Workflows/non customisable: Processes don't adapt to different issue types (e.g., Audit vs. Compliance).

• Manual Triage: No AI recommendations for assignment or priority.

Current isssue management process

Issue Creators struggle with complex, time-consuming forms and a lack of clarity on mandatory fields. Triage Managers are overwhelmed by manual assessments for every issue, lacking the intelligence to suggest root causes or detect duplicates. Meanwhile, Issue Owners are often unaware of critical SLA deadlines, leading to delays and potential penalties

Persona challenges

Our users are currently overwhelmed by:

• Complex Forms: Submitters struggle with time-consuming, confusing fields.

• Lack of Visibility: Owners are often unaware of SLA deadlines or the severity of an issue.

• Manual Toil: Triage managers must manually map owners and assess impact because the system lacks intelligence.

• Fragmented Information: Evidence and root cause analyses are scattered across different attachments and fields.

Project goals

• Market Leadership: The overarching goal is to position the platform as the premier choice for large enterprises that require comprehensive and integrated issue management across all GRC domains.

• Increase User Adoption and Satisfaction: A major focus is placed on reducing operational complexity and friction by providing intuitive interfaces, guided workflows, and enriching interactions. Creating these intuitive interfaces and visualizations is specifically intended to align with this goal of enhancing user satisfaction.

• Enhance Operational Efficiency: The sources emphasize enabling customers to significantly reduce manual effort. This is achieved through workflow automation, AI-assisted issue triage, predictive analytics, and structured remediation planning.

• Strengthen Customer Retention and Growth: Business success is driven by fostering deeper engagement with existing clients and attracting new enterprise customers through clear product differentiation and a compelling ROI.

• Improve Scalability and Reduce Customization: Strategic objectives include bringing down the need for heavy customizations while improving the overall user experience and system scalability.

• Integrated Governance and Proactive Management: The vision is to empower organizations with an intelligent, proactive, and integrated solution that simplifies GRC issues, leading to actionable insights, superior governance, and a reduction in adverse impacts.

Scope

We have the opportunity to Enhance Operational Efficiency by:

• AI-Assisted Triage and decisions: Using intelligence to suggest root causes and assign owners, suggest remediation tasks.

• Guided Experiences: Providing "Playbooks" that show users exactly what to do in each state. Letting users know what are the "Next steps".

• Visual Impact Analysis: Moving away from lists and into charts that show exactly what GRC attributes are at risk. Dynamic metrics showcase what is being impacted.

Collaborative research

Research was conducted amongst internal stakeholders and external stakeholders as well. The research team conducted product-level heuristic evaluation with Internal stakeholders and came up with the biggest pain points of our customers. They also conducted competition analysis and had a set of recommendations for the product as a whole. Deeper level research relating to Issue management was conducted by the PM and UX teams with direct customers to better understand the specific issues related to Issue management. The team conducted User interviews, contextual inquiry and reverse walkthoughs with major financial institutions and banks to arrive at a detailed list of requirements and customer wants. Both these methods of research helped us arrive to a comprehensive list of requirements for business. The prioritised list of research insights is given below:

Solution

Issue overview and summarisation

Improved the overview page to indicate what the issue is about, when it was created, important dates and what state it is in. It also gives details on completion status and impact on important metrics. 

Solution

New Issue creation

The new form makes the issue reporting easy and intuitive to fill in. AI suggestions augment faster filling up and quicker decision making.

Solution

Guided tasks and workflows

Next tasks help users to tasks that they need to complete immediately. The issue resolution playbook helps to guide them through various activities to complete the resolution process.

Solution

Approval workflows

Requesting approvals from the issue pages is easy and completes the loop. Users can see the approvals associated with the issue in one place.

Next steps