Managing the permanent tension between compliance and business delivery

During one data center transformation, a product owner stopped me in the hallway.

He said to me, “We can’t take on the compliance documentation right now. My team is already at full capacity supporting quarter-end releases. If we shift our focus, we will miss our delivery commitments.”

For him, the risk was immediate: slipping a revenue-critical release. But on the technology side, the compliance timeline was immovable. Audit findings were already logged, end-of-support deadlines were approaching, and the governance work could not be deferred.

That moment captured the core tension: Business delivery runs on market deadlines, while compliance runs on regulatory mandates.

The collision is structural, not situational. Compliance costs have nearly doubled for financial institutions in recent years, reaching $61 billion. Meanwhile, organizations capture only 31 percent of expected revenue lift and 25 percent of expected cost savings from digital transformations. Technology leaders face both realities simultaneously.

When audit findings surface across 100+ applications requiring remediation, the resolution timeline isn’t negotiable. When a data center transformation requires migrating 100+ applications with compliance frameworks at every phase, the governance work can’t be skipped. Business projects absorb the displacement.

One example: A major claims application was scheduled for Q2 delivery. The business had planned a feature update tied to operational efficiencies.

Midway through planning, the application surfaced multiple compliance gaps tied to audit findings and end-of-support infrastructure. The entire team had to be redirected to compliance documentation, evidence gathering, and remediation. This absorbed nearly 100 percent of available development capacity for several weeks. The Q2 release was postponed. Roadmap commitments were pushed out.

Navigating this required transparent conversation about risk. We walked stakeholders through the regulatory implications: Failed audits, extended remediation cycles, potential system instability, increased scrutiny in subsequent audit cycles. Once the business understood that compliance deadlines were immovable, the conversation shifted from frustration to alignment.

A decision framework for competing priorities

When weighing a regulatory deadline against a business initiative, I use a three-part framework.

• Regulatory immovability: If the compliance milestone is tied to audit findings, end-of-support software, or time-bound requirements, it takes priority.
• Business impact window: Would delaying the release cause revenue loss, contractual breaches, or customer experience degradation?
• Operational risk exposure: Does running on non-compliant infrastructure pose security risk that outweighs business urgency?

This framework shows stakeholders that prioritization isn’t subjective. It gives frustrated product owners transparency into how decisions are made.

Building structures that acknowledge both realities

Effective portfolio management treats compliance and business delivery as parallel streams needing explicit capacity planning. Prioritization criteria must account for regulatory timelines, business impact, technical dependencies, and resource availability simultaneously.

Executive sponsorship changes the conversation. When compliance work has visible C-suite backing and gets discussed in strategic terms, business stakeholders stop viewing it as an IT problem. Organizations with strong leadership support are seven times more likely to meet transformation goals.

After we built compliance capacity into the operating model, planning cycles became more predictable. The number of conflicts dropped because governance tasks were no longer surfacing as last-minute blockers. They were pre-planned into the quarterly roadmap, allowing teams to anticipate effort, allocate resources earlier, and avoid abrupt priority shifts.

Cross-border coordination

Coordinating across international business units required detailed planning and context-sensitive support. Smaller units requested guidance given their limited staffing. They asked for documentation templates, sample completed packages, and opportunities to speak with someone who had managed the work at scale.

We organized knowledge-sharing sessions with senior technology and governance leaders, walked through each step of the compliance sequence, and clarified what the work would entail. The transformation office hosted weekly deep-dive sessions, ensuring each unit felt prepared. This collaboration helped standardize understanding, reduce rework, and create a predictable path regardless of entity size or maturity.

The permanent operating condition

The paradox doesn’t resolve. Technology leaders who succeed stop trying to eliminate the tension, and instead, build organizational capacity to navigate it continuously.

Start by institutionalizing compliance capacity. Protecting roughly 30 percent of delivery capacity for compliance work stabilized our operating model. This doesn’t reduce capacity for innovation; it embeds compliance into the delivery cadence so it’s anticipated and funded from the start. We partnered with governance and security leaders to frame discussions around outcomes that matter: Reduced audit exposure, lower operational risk, more predictable delivery cycles.

Once leaders understood that compliance capacity was a structural requirement for sustainable delivery, the conversation shifted from “Why do we need this?” to “How can we finish this quickly?”