How to Use Strategic Program Management To Elevate Your Trust & Safety Program

Program management is an important part of every type of program from anti-piracy to compliance to fraud.

Today we’re going to focus on how strategic program management can help elevate your Trust & Safety program through communication, organization, and reporting. Whether you manage programs relating to digital crimes, digital safety, cybersecurity or fraud prevention, these tips can help make your program more effective.

Communication

You need to keep your team informed and on the same page. Any team, especially those in the constantly evolving and fast-moving fraud world, need to be able to communicate effectively. The pandemic led to an increase in coronavirus scams. It also led to an increase in online shopping. Did your fraud team know how this was affecting their work? As fraudsters’ MOs change and new types of fraud are found, you need to be in sync at all times. Newsletters and process documents are two huge ways that can help.

Newsletters

Program newsletters are a good way to keep your team and stakeholders updated. They allow you to announce big information, provide updates on specific projects, recognize a job well done, and make your team feel more connected. You can also use your newsletter to announce new policies or to provide information on current news and trends.

Process documentation is essential to all process-oriented work, especially if you have multiple people on a team doing the same work. Make sure each team member is responding to threats the same way. Reduce mistakes. Lower disagreement. Increase efficiency. And improve your process over time.

Process Documents

At IPS, we make sure to document all our processes. In fact, I’ve developed several shared OneNote notebooks outlining processes and other important information. These shared OneNote notebooks include, for example, the process for responding to incident reports, flow charts, email templates, steps to investigate, and contacts for different situations. This makes it easy to train new team members and is great to reference if you deal with a lot of moving parts. In an industry where time is critical, up-to-date process documentation can help decrease your response time and increase consistency.

Organization

At IPS, we’ve successfully helped several trust & safety programs stay organized through online portal and mailbox administration, as well as with data management. We’ve found that maintaining SLAs is a lot easier if you have strong organizational skills. For example, using Gantt charts or other types of PM tactics can keep you on track to complete projects on time.

We’ve also found that organizational skills are vital in email triage. If you have a full inbox, even something as simple as creating rules to auto-file emails into specific folders can make your day a lot easier. We also recommend categorizing emails via Outlook’s built-in function. You can even set up quick steps for template responses. Organization is important in any field, but especially in ours where quick responses can be crucial.

Reporting

You can show the value-add of your program or project through stats reports. They are a great way to demonstrate the success and impact of your program.

You can use your program newsletters to distribute these reports and highlight your successes.

The marker for a job well done is that fraud isn’t happening or is being stopped quickly. Reports can show that impact in a way that makes your team feel great about what they are accomplishing. Reports can also show your company’s leadership your progress in a compelling way. Reflection is an important part of process improvement, so creating a baseline report can help you and your team review your work and processes to make refinements moving forward.

Every program needs some management to help it function optimally. Strategic program management techniques such as communication, organization, and reporting can augment your work to increase efficiency, team morale, and consistency.

It may be easy to focus on the daily mechanics and processes but if you implement some of these strategic program management practices, you are sure to benefit.