Quick Answer:
The eight GRC implementation challenges that stall most rollouts are: high costs, resistance to change, integration issues, data management complexity, resource constraints, a poor shared understanding of what GRC is, a siloed approach, and technology that was never fit for the job. Six of the eight are organisational rather than technical. The single most useful fix is to go live narrow and deep, running one obligation end to end, rather than configuring every module before anyone uses anything.
In this guide
- Implementation challenges vs the challenges of running GRC
- The eight GRC implementation challenges, and the fix for each
- Four solutions that address more than one challenge at once
- Early warning signs, week by week
- When to pause a GRC implementation rather than push
- GRC implementation best practices
- Tools, scaling and culture
- How Sentrient reduces GRC implementation challenges
- Where to go next in the GRC guide series
- The bottom line on overcoming GRC implementation challenges
- Frequently asked questions about GRC implementation challenges
55%
of board time now spent on compliance in 2025, up from 24% ten years ago (Productivity Commission)
88% vs 13%
of projects met or exceeded objectives with excellent change management, against poor (Prosci)
Governance, risk and compliance is not a buzzword. It is the framework that keeps an organisation organised, within the law and resilient when something goes wrong.
For HR managers and business owners it can look complex from the outside, and the complexity people actually hit is rarely in the concept. It is in the rollout.
The burden is growing rather than steady. The Productivity Commission notes that a survey of company directors found boards were spending 55% of their time on compliance in 2025, up from 24% ten years earlier.
That is governance attention more than doubling in a decade, which is precisely why a rollout that goes badly is expensive twice: once in the project, and again in the leadership time it consumes afterwards.
This guide covers what goes wrong while you are standing a GRC system up, and what fixes each one.
Every challenge below has been named by organisations partway through an implementation, which is a different list from the problems you have once it is running.
This guide covers the Australian context. Obligations vary by sector, size and jurisdiction, and work health and safety duties differ between states and territories.
Implementation Challenges vs The Challenges Of Running GRC
Two different sets of problems get discussed as though they were one, and the advice for each is almost opposite. It is worth knowing which one you have.
| GRC implementation challenges | Ongoing GRC challenges | |
|---|---|---|
| When they occur | Between the signed contract and go-live | Once the system is live and business as usual |
| What they look like | Decisions queuing, scope arguments, migration problems, people not turning up to workshops | Reviews lapsing, overdue actions accumulating, reporting nobody acts on |
| Who owns them | The project sponsor and the internal project owner | The compliance lead and every line manager |
| How they end | The project either goes live or quietly stops | They never end. They are managed on a rhythm |
| Covered in | This guide | 5 common governance, risk and compliance challenges |
The sequence for the rollout itself, step by step, is in how to implement a GRC system in your business. This page is its companion: that one is the order, this one is what breaks in it.
What you are implementing, in one paragraph
Governance decides who is accountable and how decisions are recorded. Risk management identifies what could go wrong and controls it. Compliance meets legal obligations and holds the evidence. A GRC system holds all three off one set of records. If any of that is unfamiliar, start with what is GRC and come back, because challenge number six below is what happens when a project starts without that shared understanding.
The Eight GRC Implementation Challenges, And The Fix For Each
| # | Challenge | Technical or organisational? |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | High costs | Part technical, part expectation |
| 2 | Resistance to change | Organisational |
| 3 | Integration issues | Technical |
| 4 | Data management complexity | Technical |
| 5 | Resource constraints | Organisational |
| 6 | Lack of understanding of GRC | Organisational |
| 7 | A siloed approach | Organisational |
| 8 | Inadequate technology | Decision made before the project started |
Six of the eight are organisational. That is the most useful thing on this page, because it means the first place to look when a rollout stalls is almost never the software.
1. High Costs
What it looks like: traditional GRC platforms can require substantial investment in licences, infrastructure and implementation services.
Smaller organisations in particular struggle with the upfront outlay for comprehensive compliance systems, and the figure that derails a business case is usually the one nobody quoted rather than the licence.
The fix: ask every shortlisted vendor for the same six lines over three years, not year one: licence, implementation, content, regulatory updates, integration and internal time, and exit.
Scalable cloud platforms with subscription pricing let you start with the modules you need and add the rest, which spreads the cost without delaying the compliance benefit.
Total cost of ownership over three years is the comparison that separates vendors; a low-priced implementation that never quite finishes costs more than a well-supported one that works.
2. Resistance To Change
What it looks like: employees see new compliance requirements as extra work landing on an already full week.
The clearest symptom is the old spreadsheet still being maintained alongside the new system, which is a vote of no confidence expressed as diligence.
The fix: lead with what the system removes rather than what it adds. Show a manager that their team’s training status is now one screen instead of three emails.
Retire the old spreadsheet on a named date so there is no parallel path. And make sure the new process is genuinely less work than the old one, because if it is not, the resistance is information rather than obstruction.
This is the challenge with the strongest evidence behind it. Prosci’s research across more than 2,600 change practitioners found that 88% of projects with excellent change management met or exceeded their objectives, against only 13% of those with poor change management, with 73% for good and 39% for fair. In other words, how well the people side is handled predicts the outcome far more reliably than the technology does.
3. Integration Issues
What it looks like: the new system does not talk to payroll, HR or identity, so data is entered twice and the two versions drift apart. Silos re-form inside the tool that was bought to remove them.
The fix: settle integrations in evaluation, not implementation. Ask specifically which systems the platform connects to as standard, which need custom work, and who pays for it.
Where a live integration is not justified, a scheduled export is usually enough and far simpler to maintain. The practical detail is in how to integrate compliance software with existing business tools.
4. Data Management Complexity
What it looks like: collecting, cleaning and maintaining compliance data across departments becomes overwhelming, particularly where records live in several formats maintained by several people with different conventions.
The fix: migrate imperfect data rather than waiting for perfect data. A training record that is 70% complete is a baseline; a training record still being cleansed in month four is a stalled project.
Load what you have, mark the gaps as gaps, and let the system show you where the holes are. That visibility is the point, and it arrives faster than any cleansing exercise.
5. Resource Constraints
What it looks like: limited staff and limited expertise, particularly in smaller organisations where the person running the implementation also has a full operational role. Decisions queue, and the timeline slips by the length of the queue.
The fix: reduce scope rather than adding people, because adding people to a compliance project rarely works and reducing scope always does.
Pick the obligation with the shortest response clock, take it end to end including reporting, go live with that, and add the next one. Protect a small amount of time reliably rather than a large amount occasionally.
6. Lack Of Understanding Of GRC Across The Organisation
What it looks like: people treat GRC as a compliance department activity, or as software, or as paperwork. Without a shared understanding, stakeholders undervalue the work, attendance at workshops drops, and the project is quietly reclassified as somebody else’s.
The fix: educate stakeholders before the configuration starts, and do it in their language. A line manager does not need the ISO definition; they need to know that this is the system that will tell them when a team member’s clearance lapses.
Run a short session for each audience rather than one long session for everyone, and open with what the audience gets rather than what the organisation needs.
7. A Siloed Approach To GRC
What it looks like: governance, risk and compliance are configured by three groups who do not talk, so the system launches with three disconnected registers.
Incidents do not update risks, obligations do not link to policies, and the reporting stitches nothing together. The organisation has bought integration and implemented separation.
The fix: implement an integrated approach deliberately. Insist that at least one chain works end to end before go-live: an incident that updates a risk, triggers a corrective action and appears in a report.
If that chain does not work on day one, it rarely gets built later, because after go-live everyone is busy. The case for the connected approach is in the benefits of integrating GRC.
8. Inadequate Technology
What it looks like: the platform cannot do what the organisation needs, or needs so much configuration that it amounts to building software.
Legacy tools show this most clearly: reporting that requires an export, content written for another country, and a support model that is a ticket queue.
The fix: this one is mostly cured before the project starts, in evaluation. If you are already committed, be honest early about which requirements the platform will not meet and plan around them rather than through them.
Scope the system to what it does well and keep the rest outside it. The triggers that indicate a platform has been outgrown are in why Australian businesses are upgrading to modern GRC systems.
Four Solutions That Address More Than One Challenge At Once
Some fixes are specific to one problem. These four each remove or reduce several, which makes them the highest-value things to get right.
| The solution | What it involves | Which challenges it addresses |
|---|---|---|
| Educate stakeholders on GRC | Short, audience-specific sessions before configuration begins, framed around what each group gets | No shared understanding, resistance to change, and the attendance problem behind resource constraints |
| Develop a change management plan | A named sponsor, a communications sequence, a date the old process is retired, and a plan for the week-three dip when numbers get worse before they get better | Resistance to change, and the loss of executive confidence that follows the dip |
| Allocate adequate resources | A named internal owner with actual capacity, not a title. Protected time, and manager time booked in advance rather than requested in the week it is needed | Resource constraints, decision queues, and the timeline slippage caused by both |
| Implement an integrated GRC approach | One chain working end to end before go-live: incident updates risk, triggers action, appears in a report | Siloed approach, integration issues, and the data duplication behind data management complexity |
The change management plan is the one with published evidence behind it rather than argument. Prosci’s research puts projects with excellent change management at 88% meeting or exceeding objectives, against 13% for those with poor change management – roughly one in eight. That gap is larger than any feature comparison between platforms will ever produce.
The one to start with if you can only do one
The change management plan, specifically the part that warns leadership the numbers will get worse around week three. Training completion looks low because it is finally being measured rather than assumed, and incident reports rise because reporting became easy. Both are the system working. An executive who sees that unprepared concludes the rollout is failing at the exact point it is succeeding, and withdrawn executive confidence is the hardest thing on this page to recover.
Early Warning Signs, Week By Week
GRC implementation challenges rarely announce themselves. They show up as small scheduling symptoms first, and each one has a week where it is still easy to fix.
| By this point | The warning sign | What it actually means |
|---|---|---|
| Week 2 | A configuration question has been open for more than a few days | The internal owner has the title but not the capacity. Fix now, because every later decision joins the same queue |
| Week 3 | Nobody can say which version of a policy is current | The document set was never reconciled. Reconcile it before loading, not after |
| Week 4 | The obligations list is still described as “mostly there” | It does not exist. The system is being configured against assumptions |
| Week 5 | Risk owners are departments rather than people | The accountability conversation has been avoided. It will not get easier after go-live |
| Week 6 | Managers have not attended anything yet | They will meet the system for the first time when work lands in their queue, and they will push back then instead of now |
| Week 7 | Data cleansing is still in progress | Perfect data is being waited for. Load what exists and let the gaps show |
| Week 8 | The old spreadsheet is still being updated | There is no retirement date, so there is a parallel path, and the parallel path always wins |
| Go-live week | The weekly review is not in anyone’s calendar | The rhythm will not start on its own. This is the most reliable predictor of a system that goes quiet by month four |
None of those require a status report to spot. They are all visible in a five-minute conversation, which is why a short weekly project check is worth more than a long monthly one.
When To Pause A GRC Implementation Rather Than Push
Almost nobody writes this section, because it argues against finishing. But pushing a rollout through certain conditions produces a live system nobody trusts, which is worse than a delayed one.
- Accountability is genuinely undecided: If the organisation cannot say who owns a risk, the system will record that ambiguity rather than resolve it. Settle it first, in a governance meeting, not a configuration session.
- The executive sponsor has changed and the new one has not re-committed: A project carried by momentum alone stops the first time it needs somebody else’s week.
- A major restructure lands mid-project: Reporting lines drive the permission model, training assignment and escalation. Rebuilding all three twice costs more than a pause.
- The pilot found something structural: A pilot that surfaces a design problem has done its job. Delaying go-live by a week to act on it is the best-value week in the project.
Pausing is not the same as stopping. Name the condition that has to be met, name who will confirm it, and set a date to resume. A pause without those three becomes an abandonment nobody announced.
GRC Implementation Best Practices
1. Develop A GRC Strategy And Framework First
A framework is what stops configuration decisions being made one at a time by whoever is in the room. Four things belong in it, and all four are governance decisions rather than technology ones: the governance structure, the risk appetite, the compliance priorities, and what leadership will see and how often.
Align it with what already exists rather than replacing it. If you use ISO 31000 for risk or ISO 37301 for compliance management, attach the framework to those. APRA-regulated entities should map CPS 230 operational risk requirements at the same time. Australian obligations sit underneath all of it: WHS duties including psychosocial hazards, privacy, employment law and record-keeping.
2. Implement GRC Processes And Track Performance
Processes without measures drift. Six measures tell you whether the implementation is delivering, and each should be baselined before go-live so the comparison means something.
| Measure | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Time to produce evidence for one worker and one obligation | The single best proxy for whether the system works. Capture it before anything changes |
| Time from incident report to acknowledgement | Whether reporting is being taken seriously by the people receiving it |
| Proportion of corrective actions closed on time | The clearest predictor of a repeat incident |
| Credentials expiring in the next 30, 60 and 90 days | Whether anything can still lapse unnoticed |
| Training completion by site and role | Whether an average is hiding one location that has stopped |
| Obligations with no named owner | The gap that produces most regulatory findings. Target zero, because this one is binary |
Deliberately not on that list: a single overall compliance percentage. It is the measure most likely to look healthy while meaning nothing, and it hides exactly the segment-level problems the other six surface.
Tools, Scaling And Culture
GRC Tools And Software
Tools reduce GRC implementation challenges when they arrive with Australian compliance content already in them, and increase the challenges when they arrive empty.
The difference between “configurable” and “configured” is usually several weeks of your team’s time, and it is rarely priced.
Ask what is included as standard for your sector, who wrote the policy templates and courses, and who updates them when legislation changes.
Scaling GRC With Growth
What works at 80 staff strains at 300, usually in three places: permissions, reporting and training assignment.
Build the permission model around roles rather than named individuals, report by site and role from the beginning even when you only have one site, and set training rules that assign automatically from the role rather than by hand. Each takes slightly longer at setup and saves a rebuild later.
Embedding GRC In Culture
Culture is the part no configuration reaches. It shows up in whether people report a near miss when nothing was damaged, whether a manager raises a risk that reflects badly on their own area, and whether leadership acts on the report rather than filing it.
The practical lever is what happens after somebody reports something. If a near miss produces acknowledgement and visible action, reporting rises.
If it produces silence or blame, reporting falls, and a falling incident count gets mistaken for improving safety. That single misinterpretation undoes more compliance programmes than any technical failure.
How Sentrient Reduces GRC Implementation Challenges
Sentrient is an Australian-built GRC platform holding policies, compliance training, incident and hazard reporting, risk registers and audits in one system with reporting across all of it.
Compliance courses are legally endorsed by Australian lawyers, the platform is hosted and supported in Australia, and the support team is based in Melbourne.
Three of the eight challenges above are reduced by what the platform arrives with rather than by how it is configured: Australian policy templates and courses cut the content build, pre-built sector frameworks cut the configuration, and connected modules mean incidents, risks, policies and training are linked by default rather than by project effort.
Most customers are operational within about a week for a standard scope, and more than 1,000 organisations across Australia and New Zealand use it.
It is a poor fit for businesses under 20 staff, organisations that primarily need payroll or rostering, and buyers who want one specialist module rather than connected coverage.
An implementation that should never have started is the most expensive kind, which is why the second list matters more than the first.
Explore the GRC system, the GRC software modules or the workplace compliance system in detail.
Ask us about the fourth week, not the first
Any vendor can demonstrate a finished system. Ask what week four of your implementation looks like, what it needs from your team, and what usually goes wrong at that point. Book a free demo.
Where To Go Next In The GRC Guide Series
| If you are asking | Go to |
|---|---|
| What is GRC, and what does each pillar do | What is GRC? Governance, risk and compliance explained |
| How do we run the rollout, step by step | How to implement a GRC system |
| What challenges do we face once it is running | 5 common governance, risk and compliance challenges |
| What do we gain by joining the three pillars | The benefits of integrating GRC |
| Do we need a system at all | How to select GRC software |
| Which products should be on my shortlist | The 10 best GRC software tools in Australia |
| How do I score two shortlisted platforms | Comparing GRC systems in Australia |
| How do we know we have outgrown our current tool | Why Australian businesses are upgrading to modern GRC systems |
| How do I connect the platform to our other business tools | How to integrate compliance software with existing business tools |
| What goes wrong when implementing the risk module specifically | Implementing risk management software in 5 essential steps |
| What changes in the first 90 days after go-live | How to transform your compliance strategy |
| What does the rhythm look like after that | The operating rhythm for a GRC system |
The Bottom Line On Overcoming GRC Implementation Challenges
| The point | In one line |
|---|---|
| Six of the eight are organisational | When a rollout stalls, the first place to look is almost never the software |
| Narrow and deep beats wide and shallow | One obligation end to end, live, beats six half-configured modules |
| Migrate imperfect data | A 70% complete record is a baseline. Data still being cleansed in month four is a stalled project |
| Retire the old spreadsheet on a named date | A parallel path always wins, and its survival is the clearest sign of unaddressed resistance |
| Warn leadership about week three | Numbers get worse because they are finally measured. Withdrawn executive confidence is the hardest thing here to recover |
| Reduce scope, do not add people | Adding people to a compliance project rarely works. Reducing scope always does |
| Pausing is a legitimate decision | Name the condition, name who confirms it, set a date to resume |
| The weekly review is the whole thing | If it is not in a calendar at go-live, the system goes quiet by month four |
Frequently Asked Questions About GRC Implementation Challenges
1. What is the first step in GRC implementation?
Assess before you configure. Write one list of the obligations that apply to you, put a named person against each line, and time how long it currently takes to produce evidence for one worker and one obligation. That last number becomes your baseline, and almost nobody remembers to capture it while the answer is still embarrassing. None of those three steps require software.
2. How long does GRC implementation take?
Eight to twelve weeks from signed contract to go-live is normal for a mid-sized Australian organisation on a cloud platform with pre-built Australian content. Longer if you are migrating from another system, or where approvals wait on a monthly board. The two things that reliably extend it are a missing obligations list and accountability that has never been written down.
3. What are the biggest GRC implementation challenges?
High costs, resistance to change, integration issues, data management complexity, resource constraints, no shared understanding of what GRC is, a siloed approach, and technology that was never fit for the job. Six of those eight are organisational rather than technical, which is why extra software rarely fixes a stalled rollout and a clearer decision usually does.
4. Can a small business manage a GRC implementation?
Yes, and often faster than a large one, because there are fewer approval layers and fewer competing registers to reconcile. The constraint is capacity rather than complexity: the person running the project usually has a full operational role as well. The answer is to reduce scope rather than add people. One obligation, end to end, live, then the next one.
5. Do most GRC implementations fail?
There is no reliable published failure rate specific to GRC, and anyone quoting one should be asked for the source. What the broader change research does show is where the difference comes from: Prosci’s study of more than 2,600 change practitioners found 88% of projects with excellent change management met or exceeded objectives, against 13% with poor change management, with 73% for good and 39% for fair. The people side predicts the outcome far more reliably than the platform does, which matches what happens in GRC rollouts specifically: six of the eight common challenges are organisational rather than technical.
6. What is the biggest GRC mistake to avoid?
Configuring everything before using anything. A build with no users generates no feedback and no momentum, and month three arrives with nothing live and a project nobody can demonstrate. Take the obligation with the shortest response clock, run it end to end including its reporting, and go live with that.
7. How do I convince my team that GRC matters?
Not with the organisational case, which is about audits and regulators and belongs to somebody else. Lead with what the system removes for each audience. A line manager wants to know their team’s training status is one screen rather than three emails, and that a clearance about to lapse will reach them before it does. Run a short session per audience rather than one long session for everyone.
8. Why do our compliance numbers get worse after go-live?
Because they are being measured rather than assumed. Training completion looks low because it is now counted properly, incident reports rise because reporting became easy, and overdue actions appear because they were always overdue and invisible. This usually lands around week three and it is the system working. Brief your executive beforehand, because a leader seeing it unprepared concludes the rollout is failing at the point it is succeeding.
9. Should we clean our data before migrating it?
Only lightly. Waiting for perfect data is one of the most common reasons an implementation stalls. Load what you have, mark the gaps as gaps, and let the system show you where the holes are. That visibility is the point, and it arrives far faster than any cleansing exercise. Reconciling policy versions is the one exception worth doing first, because loading three versions of the same policy creates a problem rather than revealing one.
10. When should we pause a GRC implementation rather than push through?
When accountability is genuinely undecided, when the executive sponsor has changed without re-committing, when a major restructure lands mid-project, or when a pilot surfaces a structural design problem. Pushing through any of those produces a live system nobody trusts. Pausing is not stopping: name the condition that must be met, name who confirms it, and set a date to resume.
11. How do we stop the old spreadsheet being maintained alongside the new system?
Set a retirement date and communicate it before go-live, then make sure the new process is genuinely less work than the old one. If people keep the spreadsheet after the date, treat it as information rather than obstruction and find out what the system is not giving them. A parallel path always wins, so the question is why the parallel path still feels necessary.
Disclaimer: This article is general information for Australian workplaces, not legal advice. Obligations differ by state, territory, industry and company structure. Get advice on your specific circumstances from a qualified professional.
Sources
Productivity Commission – Regulating for growth (board time spent on compliance)
Prosci – The correlation between change management and project success
Safe Work Australia – Duties under WHS laws
Safe Work Australia – Psychosocial hazards
Safe Work Australia –Incident notification
Safe Work Australia – Key Work Health and Safety Statistics Australia, latest release
OAIC – The Privacy Act
OAIC – Notifiable Data Breaches scheme
Fair Work Ombudsman – Record-keeping
APRA – Prudential Standard CPS 230 Operational Risk Management
ISO – ISO 31000 Risk management
ISO – ISO 37301 Compliance management systems
Read More About Governance, Risk Management And Compliance
- How To Implement A GRC System In Your Business
- What Is GRC? Governance, Risk And Compliance Explained
- 5 Common Governance, Risk And Compliance Challenges, And How To Overcome Them
- The Benefits Of Integrating GRC Into Your Business Operations
- How A GRC System Can Transform Your Compliance Strategy In Australia
- Why Australian Businesses Are Upgrading To Modern GRC Systems
- The Ultimate Guide To GRC Systems In Australia
