The internal audit functions that continue to innovate and adapt their processes are those that provide the most value and aid in shielding their organizations from detrimental control failures. To accomplish this, audit leadership must create an operational framework that encourages ongoing, strategically focused change. Maintaining an increased rate of internal change that endures.
The size of your function, the scope and complexity of the changes you have determined will still be required for determining how you set up to manage the changes you wish to make. In our experience, there are two basic operating model options that leaders must decide between when deciding how changes will be managed in their function.
The first one concerns how you will handle the change in addition to your primary duty of providing ongoing assurance. You could ask coworkers to manage the change in addition to their regular duties, which is what we refer to as a "side of desk" approach. When the change is deemed to require little effort or in smaller functions, this is likely the best course of action. However, if your change is complicated, such as if you intend to implement agile or use a sophisticated integrated analytics approach for your audit work, this could become a problem. Where the change is more complicated, you might want to look into different resourcing models. For instance, forming a temporary team or allowing someone to take a break from regular audit work so they can fully concentrate on the change you want to make we have also observed larger organizations establishing permanent change capabilities in the audit function.
Whichever of these models is best for your situation, you must consider how taking people away from their audit work will affect the delivery of your audit plan. This includes how expecting colleagues to manage additional change activity from "side of their desk" may impair core audit delivery.
A year two "embedding project" in your change initiatives with a project manager, project reporting, activities to support embedding, and straightforward measurement of how the embedding is going may be something you want to consider for major initiatives. A heat map approach to tracking the integration of "product development" into the ongoing work of the internal audit function is one that we have used very successfully here.
The size of your function, the scope and complexity of the changes you have determined will still be required for determining how you set up to manage the changes you wish to make. In our experience, there are two basic operating model options that leaders must decide between when deciding how changes will be managed in their function.
The first one concerns how you will handle the change in addition to your primary duty of providing ongoing assurance. You could ask coworkers to manage the change in addition to their regular duties, which is what we refer to as a "side of desk" approach. When the change is deemed to require little effort or in smaller functions, this is likely the best course of action. However, if your change is complicated, such as if you intend to implement agile or use a sophisticated integrated analytics approach for your audit work, this could become a problem. Where the change is more complicated, you might want to look into different resourcing models. For instance, forming a temporary team or allowing someone to take a break from regular audit work so they can fully concentrate on the change you want to make we have also observed larger organizations establishing permanent change capabilities in the audit function.
Whichever of these models is best for your situation, you must consider how taking people away from their audit work will affect the delivery of your audit plan. This includes how expecting colleagues to manage additional change activity from "side of their desk" may impair core audit delivery.
A year two "embedding project" in your change initiatives with a project manager, project reporting, activities to support embedding, and straightforward measurement of how the embedding is going may be something you want to consider for major initiatives. A heat map approach to tracking the integration of "product development" into the ongoing work of the internal audit function is one that we have used very successfully here.
