Companies looking to survive and thrive in today’s competitive landscape will need agility, or the ability to react quickly. Although they were originally used in software development, agile techniques have many applications in the world of modern business, and can be useful to companies approaching their internal audits. Here’s a quick guide to agile auditing and a few reasons many internal audit teams are adopting these practices.
What is agile auditing?
Agile audits move at a faster pace than traditional audits, which require extensive planning, fieldwork, and reporting. Agile audits also allow for audit teams to quickly refocus their attention and efforts as needed.
Agile auditing utilizes the following key practices:
Maintaining audit backlogs
Audit teams using agile auditing keep a backlog of audit programs that have been reviewed and approved. The audit team then adds, removes, or reprioritizes the programs in the backlog as the auditing environment evolves. Taking this approach allows the audit team to focus on only the most pressing issues at any given time. It also reduces the likelihood of wasting time on an issue from a previous audit plan that’s now become irrelevant.
Creating user stories
Agile auditing teams create user stories consisting of a user, an action, and an outcome, with each story corresponding to a particular unit of work related to the audit.
In these user stories, the user is the person responsible for performing critical tasks in the unit of work, while the action is whatever the user needs to do to generate the desired outcome.
For instance, a retailer (or user) might want to process credit card payments from online customers (the critical action), so that these customers can order online (the desired outcome). These user stories give the auditing team an understanding of the user’s desired outcome and the requirements to achieve that outcome.
Working in sprints
Once the audit team has a defined story, they can conduct their work in sprints, with each sprint typically completed in one to four weeks. Audit sprints often include both defined tasks and regular check-ins with stakeholders. A sprint has a planning phase in addition to daily “scrums”—short meetings between stakeholders and the audit team. The daily agenda during an audit sprint includes yesterday’s progress, today’s game plan, and any possible challenges going forward.
An audit sprint is concluded when preliminary results are delivered to stakeholders. Since the results of each sprint are reviewed regularly over the course of the audit, there’s less of a chance for unwanted surprises when the team submits the final audit report to stakeholders.
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Agile auditing fosters more robust partnerships and helps to improve the accuracy and integrity of an audit’s findings by facilitating timelier and more frequent communications between auditors and stakeholders. Agile auditing can also allow your audit team and your business to quickly identify and solve problems.
If you’re trying to decide if you’re ready to transition to agile auditing practices or need help guiding your internal audit team through implementation, we’re happy to help. Contact us for more information.