Rolling Out New Compliance Requirements to 200+ Instructors

The challenge

After its acquisition, the company had to meet its new parent university’s guidelines and compliance standards. For the instruction team, more than half the company, that meant more student checks and more documentation on top of existing work.

Handing the extra work down as a directive would have met real friction from the people who had to carry it out.

The work

Speros used Built by the Team, his own approach to large changes, developed over years of leading teams.

Frame. He brought key team leads and instructors together, laid out where things stood and the outcome the new standards required, and left the how to them.

Propose. Five days later they presented a draft change to the team’s procedures. After one round of feedback and revision, he approved it.

Q&A. Everyone affected received an outline of what was changing, why, and what came next: a week of optional in-person Q&A sessions, open to anyone with questions, followed by the beta and the launch.

Beta. For two weeks, the team ran the new process in their daily work as a trial. Mistakes could be caught and fixed along the way without real consequences, before the process became official.

Launch. A review meeting at the end of the beta found no major issues and nothing to roll back. On the announced launch date, the team formally switched over, and the new process became the standard way of working.

The outcome

The new process went live about a month after kickoff and passed compliance review. The leads and instructors who designed it became its advocates with their peers. Speros used the same approach for changes before, during, and after the acquisition.