My Key Priorities to Develop the Function as Head of Compliance

Tatsiana Vaskovich was recently appointed as Godel’s new Head of Compliance, which will combine with her Client Service Manager role. We sat down with Tatsiana to discuss her interesting background at Godel and what she hopes to accomplish in her new role.

Congratulations, Tatsiana on your recent promotion. Will you tell us about your background at Godel?

I started my career at Godel in 2009 when there were only about 40 people in the company. I first joined as an ADC/BA. I coordinated a number of projects for our customers, later working as a senior ADC — combining coordination of my projects with supporting other general ones. Back then, it was called the project manager, but the essence of the work was like what we now call ADC. In 2017, I left Godel for 2 years to pursue other avenues. In 2019, I looked for new opportunities and found there were new interesting positions in Godel where I could bring value. I also found I missed Godel and the people especially.

When I returned to Godel, I joined as a Client Service Manager where the client service function started to be responsible for onboarding new engagements for clients. Since then, I continue with my client service role, had the chance to take part in paid consultancy and also work as a part of the pre-sales function. This includes working as the consultant to qualify business and to be able to answer client’s delivery related matters. And finally, my journey takes me to the compliance function that I joined in June 2021.

How did your compliance role come together? Did it come from a mix of your past experiences? Does this role bring it all together for you in a way?

Working as an ADC and Delivery Manager has given me a great deal of delivery experience, so I feel like I understand the role from the inside. It also helps that I have built a good repour with division managers which I have known for many years. I enjoy the elements of the Client Service Manager role as it gives me the opportunity to oversee a few engagements, not just one team or project.

What would you say is the biggest challenge you are working on?

The biggest challenge right now is that, as a compliance function, we don’t have a shared vision on the compliance function scope and lower level/interim goals. We are in the process to talk to all the divisions, understand their achievements and pain points in terms of being compliant to best practices. From then, we will then establish the relationship with people in the division who will be involved and identify the most crucial things we want to look at in the first instances. A lot of the divisions are doing their own versions of compliance already and there are many examples of techniques and methods that certain areas of the business have already applied.

As Head of Compliance, what are your priorities?

By understanding the primary company goals and being able to observe the trends, I believe that the current priorities for the compliance function are to build the function community and then together, re-define the function scope, strategy and ways of working. In parallel, we do our best to pick up newly raised requests related to compliance, from figuring out document templates for the divisions, to supporting technical leadership practices or taking part in security discussion.

As Head of Compliance, I would like to ensure we establish a solid approach of sharing existing best practices to avoid wasting effort on their duplication. Also, one of the key next steps will be creating the transparent compliance request workflow — once picked up, who works on it, when to expect outcomes and where they will be placed. Finally, it feels like we also need to establish a mechanism, allowing us to understand if we are compliant to set standards and set up communication loops to enable getting feedback efficiently. Feedback is very key when it comes to continuously improving standards, which is what we are definitely keen to do.