Implementing a GRC program is an important step in helping an organization reliably achieve objectives, address uncertainty, and act with integrity. Ensuring its success by measuring its efficiency, effectiveness, and agility is the next step.

Without measuring these areas, you risk having an unsuccessful GRC program that may increase your operating costs, decrease employee satisfaction, and negatively impact your market value and credibility.

Measuring the success of your GRC program with clearly defined metrics will help your organization deliver on outcomes and hit goals. We’ll take a closer look at the process and metrics below.

Measuring success in a GRC program

While the exact process for measuring the success of your GRC program should be tailored to your unique needs and desired outcomes, four key areas to monitor are efficiency, effectiveness, responsiveness, and resiliency.

Here are some ways you might measure the performance of your GRC program in each area:

• Efficiency: Compare how much time GRC processes and functions take before and after the program is implemented.
• Effectiveness: Consider how much more accurate, timely, and reliable your organization’s GRC-related information has become. 
• Responsiveness (or agility): Examine how well your organization keeps up with and responds to dynamic regulatory requirements, compliance requirements, and risk environments.
• Resiliency: Assess your organization’s ability to withstand or quickly recover from a security incident that disrupts its operations.

GRC metrics

There are many success metrics you could use to measure the success of your GRC program. Below are a few to consider.

Governance

• The percentage of employees that have viewed and accepted policies
• The percentage of employees that have completed GRC-related training
• The number of policy exceptions and/or violations
• The rate of employee turnover

Risk metrics

• The frequency of risk assessments
• The number of critical findings from risk assessments
• The average time it takes to remediate risk incidents 
• The percentage of identified risks that have mitigation plans in place
• The number of vulnerabilities found during scans or external assessments

Compliance metrics

• The number of critical audit findings
• The percentage of internal audits completed by deadline
• The number of compliance frameworks achieved
• The number of control test failures
• The number of compliance violations 
• The ratio of discrepancies between internal and external audits
• The average amount of time since a system or equipment failure (also known as the mean time between failures)

You can also measure the success of your GRC program based on its maturity score. We’ll explain how to calculate that score next.