How to handle compliance maintenance without stalling IT projects
Compliance maintenance consumes up to 80 percent of IT staff time, leaving small teams unable to work on daily support and technical projects. Spending years achieving certification often leads to a situation where ongoing maintenance crowds out the rest of the job entirely.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
Found another way around this?
Share your steps and trade-offs so fellow engineers don't have to reinvent the wheel. No account required.
- 1Using compliance automation and management software like Futurefeed to streamline documentationDid this help you?
- 2Punting core IT projects and improvementsDid this help you?
- 3Quitting and looking for a new jobDid this help you?
- 4Convincing leadership to hire a dedicated compliance teamDid this help you?
- 5Finding out about incidents manually by word of mouth or by actively searching systemsDid this help you?
- 6Gathering fragmented data from multiple software systems and payroll manually by handDid this help you?
- 7Accepting the risk of missing deadlinesDid this help you?
- 8Submitting AI-generated lesson plans using tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or MagicSchool AIDid this help you?
- 9Recycling and submitting the same exact lesson plan week after weekDid this help you?
- 10Making minimal or fake plans just to satisfy the submission checkDid this help you?
- 11Keeping actual working notes in personal notebooks or slide decksDid this help you?
- 12Writing vague goals like making it through the year with health intactDid this help you?
- 13Using AI tools like ChatGPT to automatically generate the goalsDid this help you?
- 14Reusing generic terms like collaboration or keeping up with researchDid this help you?
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“It is the professional goal that gets me.”source ↗
“Instead, I have to make lesson plans with a really specific template, and in order to fill the template out I am often adding things that I probably won't actually do in class and spending a lot of time having to defend why every activity is being done.”source ↗
“What kills me is that nobody reads them! They only check to see that they are submitted.”source ↗
“I ended up being late on submitting the "formal" plans and got in trouble over it.”source ↗
“Every year having to come up with a “goal” and data/artifacts just makes the whole seem more like hoop-jumping than a quality endeavor. I just find it exhausting and insulting.”source ↗
“It's been an annual waste of time for me for the past 30 years.”source ↗
“At this point, it feels like 80% of my time goes toward compliance.”source ↗
“Those projects keep getting pushed back because compliance and daily support consume nearly all my time.”source ↗
“It’s frustrating to spend two years getting certified, only to realize that maintaining it leaves almost no room for the rest of your job.”source ↗
“I’m in the exact same boat as you. 3 person team and we just got level 2 in May. It’s been a shit show and that train isn’t stopping anytime soon.”source ↗
“We have two business days to report a workplace injury to WCB here. Two. The clock starts when the employer becomes aware, and "the employer" in practice means whichever supervisor was standing there.”source ↗
“What doesn't exist is anything telling me they happened. No route from "supervisor logged it Thursday" to "the person who files has been told."”source ↗
“One report needs three sources: Personal details out of Avanti. Incident details out of ProSafe. SIN, six-week average hours and rate of pay out of payroll, which means asking someone else and waiting. Then it goes over by hand.”source ↗
“I'm the only person here who knows any of this. Nobody else has portal access, nobody else has filed one. If I'm off for a month, or I leave, the two-day clock still runs and there is no one to hear it.”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 13How to keep track of routine maintenance tasks around the house
- 3Constantly reacting to problems instead of planning
- 14When your family treats household chores like an IT help desk
- 37How to stop doing everything at once as property manager
- 21Why do big companies require so many rigid formalities?
- 16Why can't employees ever use the self service portal?