You actually limit the amount of feedback you give someone or the amount of personal details and insights, because I’m not sure that if this person mentioned like, I said to my boss that I was hurt when they said they don’t trust me. I don’t love giving the advice like, “Time to move on”, but I wonder if there’s a way to build a little bit more trust with this boss. We waste time, we have to redo work, and I want to make sure you’re putting your best foot forward when you send this to the CEO.”
The outcome of an audit can indicate the need of corrections, or corrective actions or opportunities for improvements. The monitoring of an audit could correspond to the Check Phase of the PDCA cycle. The first step of the implementation consists in the definition of audit objective, scope and criteria. The implementation phase for an audit activity consists of the DO phase of the PDCA cycle. Moreover, it is very important that auditor support the build of a positive collaborative relation with the auditee, in order to make the audit proceed smoothly.
Identify and test key controls using risk-based prioritization
Best practice internal audit management makes report collation an integral part of fieldwork, not an afterthought. Communicate frequently, explain your objectives to resonate with the team being audited, and feed back on findings, next steps and outcomes to ensure everyone involved feels part of the internal audit process. Turning up once a year, with little forewarning, auditing a department and then disappearing for another 12 months does not help build the necessary bridges between internal audit and the rest of the business. Preparing for an internal audit is vital — it will help get buy-in for the process, ensure deadlines are met, and facilitate the availability of all the data you need to conduct the audit. Based on current industry research and the updated IIA 2025 Standards, we’ve identified ten essential internal audit management strategies.
- You have to think about where you’re trying to get.
- An appropriate use of sampling shall be used, which could be dependent from the size of the organization, for example.
- This doesn’t mean every auditor needs deep technical expertise — but your function needs access to these skills through hiring, training, or co-sourcing arrangements.
- Program managers should possess a general understanding of how audits contribute to organizational objectives.
- That’s not the kind of managing up that you’re advocating for here.
- This planning phase it is essential as it allows to prepare in advance audit operations and to start the audit smoothly in a professional manner.
So I think that if you think about the tour of duty as something that is a codification, and a way of thinking about the reality that’s already there, you start to see that just making it explicit doesn’t increase your chances of losing your employees. In fact, in the startup world, if we see that someone has spent 15 years at a company, we’re kind of wondering, hey, what’s going on with this person? Think about how rarely it is that you look at a resume and you see, oh, this person spent 15 years at this company. The tour of duty is the unit of the relationship, but that’s not to say you can’t sign an employee up for future tours of duty in addition to that. I think the second point of engaging external network intelligence also make some managers a little uneasy until they think about it. And they haven’t yet gotten their arms around the fact that talented people today want to be more mobile.
- They may have information or line of sight that your manager doesn’t have that can inform what you’re doing day to day.
- Visualize and address every risk across your organization.
- While sometimes deprioritized, regulatory compliance is critical for medical device manufacturers.
- If you want to make audit an intrinsic part of corporate strategy, implementing a technology-based approach delivers substantial benefits.
Managing Conflict on Your Executive Team
This document provides guidance on auditing management systems, including the principles of auditing, managing an audit programme and conducting management system audits, as well as guidance on the evaluation of competence of individuals involved in the audit process. AI and technology enable internal audit teams to shift from sample-based testing to comprehensive data analysis, examining 100% of transactions rather than limited samples. Book a demo to discover how Diligent’s AI-powered internal audit management can streamline your internal audit management while strengthening your risk management framework. With that in mind, Diligent Audit Management provides comprehensive solutions for planning, executing, and reporting internal audits that directly support modern audit management approaches. Current platforms enable internal audit teams to access and interrogate 100% of their data, providing comprehensive coverage rather than sample-based testing. Transform your internal audit from compliance-focused to strategically valuable with AI-powered insights and automated risk management.
Build advanced data analytics capabilities for 100% audit coverage
The other thing I see is that if you’ve been working with a leader for a while or you’ve had the same manager for a while, you may think, “How am I going to bring this up? You are prioritizing your time correctly. Starting with the alignment conversation, what’s the goal of that conversation? Who am I to tell my manager what to do, or why should I have to do my manager’s job for them? So we think that managing up, it’s not our place to do that. And I think many of us, we come from upbringings or cultures where you are told to stay in your place, don’t rock the boat, respect and defer to authority.
They don’t worry about hiring people and thinking about their budgets. When we acquire these companies or we partner with them, we say, “Listen, you’ve done so well, come do this for us.” What we do is we make our teams work for them, that’s rule number one. We analyze that data real time using machine learning and precision AI. And we’re already noticing that bad actors are trying to figure out ways of entering into people’s infrastructure, trying to get in and out, extract data, use it for economic purposes. ” So it’s making sure that the goalpost does not keep moving on you and that it’s a priority because you’re treating it that way.
Developing audit program procedures 🔗
Hold daily stand-ups during audit fieldwork to identify blockers and maintain momentum. It also creates opportunities for management to begin remediation before formal report issuance. Keep communicating with your audit “clients” so everyone understands your objectives and actions. Your risk assessment will enable you to pinpoint significant risks and the controls that manage them. This allows your team to shift from routine testing to investigating exceptions and providing strategic guidance. Continuous risk monitoring closes these gaps by providing ongoing visibility into control effectiveness and emerging threats.
SOX Compliance
We can help you get there with a platform built by auditors, for auditors. You can make a strategic impact at your company.
Different audit situations may require different approaches—remote audits, on-site assessments, document reviews, or combined audits. The audit program managing an audit should also address audit techniques and methodologies. This involves establishing processes for achieving and maintaining auditor competence and improving auditor performance over time. Organizations need to ensure availability of auditors and technical experts with competence appropriate to program objectives.
But if as a cheerleader you are saying, “Actually, this is going to help us move faster in the end because if we have a sound strategy, we can make better decisions, we’ll get better results.” So it’s all about that translation piece. And again, that can lead to misunderstandings between the two because the commander can see some of that vision boarding as just a waste of time. They’re high on sociability, so they tend to be more people oriented. So that person is very results outcome oriented, no nonsense, moves quickly, tends to communicate very concisely, which to some people may be perceived as rude versus someone who is a cheerleader. And that got ironed out once this employee understood the style of the manager and adapted to it.
IT Risk & Compliance
Primarily, that’s going to be your boss, your direct supervisor, but it has to extend beyond that because we are working in environments where you may have a project lead, you want to make sure you’re building a relationship with your skip level. You’re most often doing that within an organization, a management system, an organizational culture, and a power structure that you don’t often fully understand, appreciate, or even see sometimes. Casnocha and Yeh, coauthors of the book The Startup of You, explain why it’s important for your organization to build internal and external employee networks—and how to get started if you don’t already have those groups in place informally.
Organizations may establish multiple audit programs depending on their size, complexity, and management system requirements. According to ISO 19011, it represents a set of one or more audits planned for a specific timeframe and directed toward a specific purpose. An audit program is much more than a simple schedule of audits.
Audit timing should consider business cycles, seasonal variations in food production, and resource availability. Clear communication ensures everyone understands their roles, responsibilities, and the program’s strategic importance. For smaller organizations, these activities can be addressed in a single comprehensive procedure. Each approach has distinct resource implications that must be factored into program planning. This includes costs for auditor training, travel, accommodation, and audit tools. Financial resources are necessary to develop, implement, manage, and improve audit activities.
Reputation, how do they look to other people? At the same time, they can be very attuned and almost obsessive about reputation. They really don’t care as much about who was involved or what they think about a situation, they care about, “Okay, let’s just move this along.” That’s the commander. Their conversations are focused on the outcomes, the deadlines. So, these are people, they’re your classic dominant type, driven by achievement, competition.
So I think the world will evolve where these people build these large brains, these large LLM models. You give it your own information to make that brain adaptable to your business. So focus on remediation and recovery to make sure that’s sort of stitched up. So we have products, I’m sure other people in the market have products that deliver that capability.
An internal audit ensures that internal controls are operating as they should, and as a result, helps your organization remain ahead of emerging risks. Whether you’re managing food safety audits or quality management system reviews, understanding these principles helps transform auditing from a compliance task into a strategic tool for organizational excellence. Additionally, your business may need to schedule internal audits.
Today’s intuitive audit management software addresses limitations of first-generation automation. Internal audit management can be streamlined and upgraded dramatically through audit management software. This includes peer reviews of audit work papers, supervisory reviews of significant judgments and periodic assessments of audit methodology effectiveness.