Do you think every internal audit team can do what’s in your book?

I think every team of auditors can commit to a Lean and Agile journey.  It would be inherently un-Lean to suggest folks simply import what we were doing into their environment in-total and all at once.  But the Lean and Agile concepts are universal.  Waste is real and ever present.  Change is constant.

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Years ago, I used to both take and teach martial arts, and my best friend was my first teacher.  He and I got into a fairly classic conversation about which art was better?  Was Tae Kwon Do better than Kung Fu? etc.  He stopped me and said, “you know Pres, it doesn’t matter.  If you watch the masters of each art, the top and best practitioners, they all look the same – regardless of style.  That’s because the human body only moves in certain ways.”  It's been my experience that human organizations and human processes only move in certain ways, too.  Your version of Active Auditing may look stylistically different than ours, but as long as you are making waste visible and eliminating it… you’re doing it right.

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Why’d you write this book?

You know, I wrote it because I felt like me, my team, and my audit clients had experienced something special, something that mattered and could unlock a different way of looking at our profession.  Also, I really had grown tired of simultaneously begging and demanding for a better way to work with audit clients.  As I gathered my thoughts for the book, I reflected that, as a profession, we’d been talking about this since the first time I ever spoke to an internal audit conference in 2002.  And, as a group, we internal auditors are a pretty smart bunch.  But somehow, we hadn’t been able to pick the lock on how to work together with our clients the way we wanted to.  We’d somehow stumbled on a partial solution, and I felt like I needed to share it.

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Why is there a cake on the cover of your book?

Well, it would be easy to say it’s because, “doing Active Auditing is a piece of cake.”  But, that wouldn’t be true at all.  In fact, Active Auditing takes blowing up a lot of our experience and training, which is really hard.  However, it’s no different than the “mind-blowing” that has to occur with anyone who starts a Lean journey.  I can recall the faces of many of our hard-hat wearing employees when they were being introduced to Lean for the first time.  All they needed was pitchforks and torches and the image would have been complete.  Thinking Leanly and Agilely is a very different experience and hard on everyone at the start.

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No, the reason the cake is there is to remind us that, at the end of the day, its about the Single Combined Team acting together… and eventually celebrating together.  A delightful friend and professional cake maker added the Andon in the icing, to remind us that it's also all about measuring and visually managing the work. 

 

Besides, I like cake.

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Aren’t you proposing getting too chummy with your auditees?

First, I don’t call the business folks we work with, “auditees.”  It’s a diminution of their role.  After all, they run our business.  They deliver the goods and services.  Nope. they are our Clients.

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Second, I think it’s possible for true professionals to simultaneously deeply respect the people involved and be skeptical of how business processes and controls are working.  That’s a healthy adult understanding of roles and duties.

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Third, I defy anyone to find in either the Red Book or Yellow Book, where it says the auditors and clients can’t eat a piece of cake (or whatever) with each other to celebrate successful completion of an audit. Certainly, in most countries, it would be inappropriate to pop out to the pub with each other.  But, we’re suggesting nothing more than what typically occurs between a business owner and the software development team at the end of an Agile project.  The team succeeded, so high-fives all around.

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Are there times when Active Auditing won’t work?

It’s hard to develop mutual purpose in an investigative situation.  You can have it with the investigative owner, but obviously not with the people alleged to have been involved in inappropriate activities. Probably the biggest obstacle we had with the Active Auditing approach (remember we didn’t call it that, we just did it) was having to take off our “collaborative auditor” hats and put on our investigator “police hats.”  Asking clients to view us as teammates one day and cops the next is a bit too much for most people.  If we had it to do over again, I’d suggest segregating those duties.

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The other place I’ve struggled to decide whether Active Auditing can work is with elected government auditors, where they don’t actually work for the same governing body as the people they are auditing.  It’s true that those auditors and the organization’s they oversee both work for the citizens.  But, its hard to pick up the phone and call The People to help work out mutual purpose issues.  Still, the Lean Wastes are still there, maybe worse than in private industry.  So, I firmly believe that while their Lean and Agile journey may be different from ours, they can still use the principles to attack waiting, defects, overproduction and the rest of it.

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Any regrets?

My biggest regret is not coming to view my profession in these ways sooner.  I’ve made pretty much every mistake an auditor can make in terms of building relationships and mutual purpose.  If you notice, the book is dedicated to all the auditors and clients who had to put up with me before I figured this out.  I mean that.

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