Much of your professional success and personal happiness depends on getting others to say ​”YES” to you. That is why it is crucial for you to not only understand, but put in practice the principles of influence, or you will be ignored and hear “NO” a lot.

Understanding the principles of influence allows you to ethically leverage human psychology and increase your opportunity to hear that magic word everyone wants to hear when you make a request – ​Yes! It’s based on psychology and science.

Jason Mefford is joined by Brian Ahearn, Chief Influence Officer of Influence People and one of only 20 certified trainers in the world on the Cialdini Influence Methodology. They discuss how to practically apply these principles everyday in your professional and personal life to increase your influence.

You can learn more about Brian at: influencepeople.biz, or by connecting with him on LinkedIn.

Brian’s new book: “Influence People: Powerful Everyday Opportunities to Persuade that
are Lasting and Ethical” is available in e-book or print version through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other retailers.

In this episode of our Lessons from a Chief Audit Executive (CAE) series, I speak with Bruce Turner about his career, his most recently released book: “New Auditor’s Guide to Internal Auditing,” his next book he is writing for team leaders, and how he is giving back in his third act of life to the profession of internal auditing.

I had the privilege of working with Bruce on “Sawyer’s Internal Auditing, Seventh Edition” which you can find at the IIA Bookstore and on Amazon in Kindle version (https://www.amazon.com/Sawyers-Internal-Auditing-Protecting-Organizational-ebook/dp/B07RBJKG5B/ref=sr_1_3) or Hardcover (https://www.amazon.com/Sawyers-Internal-Auditing-Protecting-Organizational/dp/1634540522/ref=sr_1_1).

You can find Bruce’s book “New Auditor’s Guide to Internal Auditing” at the IIA Bookstore and on Amazon in Kindle (https://www.amazon.com/New-Auditors-Guide-Internal-Auditing-ebook/dp/B07RY4D3RQ/ref=sr_1_2) and Paperback (https://www.amazon.com/New-Auditors-Guide-Internal-Auditing/dp/1634540549/ref=sr_1_1)

Bruce R. Turner, AM, CRMA, CISA, CFE, has more than 40 years of practitioner and leadership experience in internal auditing, including being the Chief Audit Executive at several organizations. He was the second professional internal auditor in Australia to receive Order of Australia honors. He was appointed a Member (AM) in the Queen’s Birthday Honors of 2015 in recognition of his significant service to public administration through governance and risk management practices and to the profession of internal auditing. He has recruited dozens of new auditors into internal audit roles throughout his career and watched proudly as their careers blossomed.

Transcript

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Well welcome my friends to another episode of jamming with Jason. Hey, today we’ve got, I’ve got a really special friend and guest on Bruce Turner and, you know, Bruce and I work together on this soil years internal auditing.

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version seven that just came out recently and wanted to make sure and have him on the on the show because Bruce has an amazing career.

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In and and a couple of different books that he’s written and other stuff like that that we want to kind of jump into that is really important information. If you’re in the internet a lot of things space that you should get ahold of so Bruce welcome on man.

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Thank you, Jason. It’s good to be able to talk to you. Well, and I guess, you know, in the US, I usually say, man, but I need to remember. I should be

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Saying, mate.

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To right

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So absolutely.

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Yeah, so

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So, Bruce. Maybe you know i i know who you are, but maybe just kind of

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For the

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For the listeners, give them a little background, you know, kind of about your career because I know you know you’ve you’ve had a long career in internal audit. You’ve done a lot of things. And so because of that you bring a lot of

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Different perspective.

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That most people out there don’t actually

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Have

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That’s right, Jason. I started in internal alerting way back in the late 70s, and when I was at the International Conference in Anaheim. Last month I mentioned in one of my presentations here that I’d spent 21 million minutes in internal auditing.

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That’s a lot.

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It is, and I was really fortunate to start in internal auditing in a commercial bank and

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Enjoyed the time doing that I

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Committed my career in banking and therefore had a pretty good pedigree. By the time I moved into the internal auditing area.

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And I ended up spending probably it needs in the banking arena across commercial banking merchant banking in central banking and ultimately I specialized in auditing commitment, the

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Treasury operations and commercial lending operations of those those banks which centered in Australia and I moved across 200 in New York and did work every day for a while.

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I then shifted a little bit and left banking and move to hit up the internal audit function at a state while which was the organization that when passenger services in my state.

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I spent a few years there and then moved into head of audits and risk management role at integral energy which supplied power to community.

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And I finished my career at the Australian Taxation Office, which is one of the biggest public sector organizations in Australia. So as the chief audit executive there and had a had a wonderful five years before ended up retiring.

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Well, and now there’s, you know, because I know sometimes

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You know, people might ask, Is there life after retirement. Well, I think you’ve been staying pretty busy to in retirement. And, you know, serving on boards and doing some other stuff as well, you know, even, even after and and like I said, You’ve continued to give back to the profession.

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You know, we’ll get into talking about some of the books and other stuff that you’ve been

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Doing

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But yeah, I mean, so, so like I said an amazing career, you know, kind of starting off outside of audit coming into audit.

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Moving up

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Being a chief audit executive at several different organizations, you know, being being an author, being a board member. I mean, it’s like you. You really do have a broad

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You know spectrum of experience that now you know again you’re sharing with people.

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You know across, across the world. So it was, it was fun to be able to run into and see in Anaheim. And I know those, those are always

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I don’t know if you read this way too but you know I there’s some people I hadn’t seen in 10 or 15 years you know that all of a sudden were together. And it’s like, oh, wow, you know, time, time goes, time goes so

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So I wanted to talk about, because I know, I know you just had

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A book that came out just recently through the eye.

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Foundation. It’s in

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It’s in the bookstore and I think you can get it on

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Amazon to call new auditors guide to internal auditing.

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So maybe if we can we can talk just a little bit.

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About that, because I I think this is a great resource for people

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Especially new to the profession.

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You know, whichever way they end up coming in. And so maybe if you can kind of explain a little bit about, you know, what’s what’s in that book, what people can kind of expect and and how it can help them in their career.

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I guess we identified initially the marketplace for the new words is God because people traditionally came into internal auditing from more junior positions in typically

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They left University, they completed their studies. And they found a job in internal order thing, and some of them actually stumbled into the profession and what’s the matter struggled invite I did style because it’s a fantastic profession and wonderful career.

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But in recent years you finding there’s more and more people who will come into into the audit at most senior positions.

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And a bunch of these folks coming from other professions. I saw a couple of examples in the book where people have come from.

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The same background as an example and move into internal auditing and then need to learn about internal auditing and the challenges that go with that.

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And one of the things is that people at that most senior level and mature their experience and they’ve established, you know, credibility and it shows, but when they come into the nursing profession.

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Is starting at the ground level. And they’ve got so much to learn. And that creates a lot of software for them as well because they’ve moved from being the expert in your field.

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In the clouds, because of the maturity have great expectations of them. So the idea is that the book sort of guys through all of those elements.

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That people should be familiar with coming into internal auditing.

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Who have internal order you know a bit about the profession and the capabilities and the roles that talks about the wide internal auditing and touches on the governance risk management control.

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It talks about the international Professional Practices framework. It then moves into the house in order to you know get the planning through the conducting interviews risk assessments and development order programs.

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And then it touches on the winnable internal auditing, you know, getting into the meat of it. The field work and lighting up boarded reports and

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Participating effectively in quality assessment for us and in the hopper. What a recommendation. So it gives a really good understanding to people about

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The profession and it shares a lot of stories from the front line where I’ve asked 50 practitioners from across the world to some of the insights and some of the best stories about each and loyalty and that’s included in special chapters of the book.

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Well, no. And I think that’s great. And like you said, I think.

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You know, I mean if if we rewind back you know and i i didn’t start the profession quite when you did. Right. But I know even when I did back in the 90s.

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Kind of the, the common career path was you know somebody who kind of like me, you know, we go into public accounting. We work for a public accounting firm for, you know, two to 10 years

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And then you end up kind of transitioning into internal audit.

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And so people that come through that career path are already kind of familiar with audit. They’re kind of familiar with things like the work papers and

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Having to follow standards. It’s just a matter of, you know, switching from maybe a CPA standard to the CIA standards.

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But like you said, you know, especially the last, you know, 1015 years we’re we’re bringing a lot more people in with more experience technical experience because we need that in the departments.

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And so they kind of missed a lot of that. And you know, I can, I can only imagine because we as auditors. We have our own language and we don’t even realize it. Right. And I’m sure it

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Lately,

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I’m sure you got that and some of the

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Feedback with those case studies that you did have of you know words or terms or, you know, different things that we might even use and they’re like, what does that mean

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And it’s not just the words that they use of acronyms. It says to the acronyms for everything.

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So we need to understand that for internal alerting but across the business areas that we visit. There’s a whole like more acronyms there as well. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

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Well, and like you said, you know, I mean, there’s, I think, I think nursing is a is a great example of it right where we’re seeing more and more, I guess, non

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non traditional is

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Not necessarily the right word. It’s just, it’s just the experience has been there but of bringing people that are

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Are more experienced more technical kind of in the areas of our organization and bring those skill sets that that operational side into the internal audit profession.

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So I think like the example of nurses is great. Right. And some people might say, why would you hire a nurse. Well, if you’re a hospital.

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Having a nurse on the internal audit team who understands all the medical terms can read, I can read the charts, you know, because I remember as a new auditor trying to read medical charts. When I was out of the hospitals and it’s like, I don’t understand any of this stuff right so

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We’re like, technically. Yep.

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Yeah, so these kinetic

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Including us

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Yeah yeah extends into other patients as well you know lawyers coming across to an organization that has a lot of contracts is really useful.

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I’ve used teachers who’ve come from it out adult education background and they’re really good people to get out there and start educating people about the risk of fraud and corruption.

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You know, I’ve had former police officers and detectives coming in and working in my investigations team. I’ve had business process engineers who’ve come in.

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Where there’s been a particular improvement focus within the organization.

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And as we start drilling into the tops of people who are coming in, we can actually see the potential of having a multi disciplinary order.

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Well, and I think that

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That is the future. That’s, that’s where we’re going. Because again, you know, the more

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The more technical our organizations get and we probably should have been doing it all along. We just I think kind of woke up, you know, a decade or so ago and have started to try to bring bring more people in because we need that skill set and

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To really understand the business better you know there’s that whole that whole term. You need to understand the business, but it’s it’s different.

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To just interview somebody and kind of understand what they’re doing versus actually

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You know, having been a lawyer for five years or a nurse or a police officer.

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You bring in a completely

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Different set of experiences and it makes our teams, much, much better. So

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It doesn’t it. Yeah.

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So I you know I know that’s like you said, that’s a great niche book. So for anybody who’s maybe new new into internal auditing. This is a great resource for you, right, to be able to kind of understand and get a leg up on

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On some of the stuff that’s going

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On out there. So whether you’re the new auditor.

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Or even if you’re the

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You know the supervisor.

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Manager, CAE. Who’s bringing

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People in

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From other parts of the organization. This is a great resource.

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To help them out and to help help you even kind of understand and

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empathize with what some of these people may be going through as well. Now I know you’re what you’re working on a new book, too. And I think, I think the working title is something about the team leaders book. Right. You want to tell us a little bit about that.

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And what we can expect with that.

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Yeah, so the working title at the moment is team leaders guide to internal lot of leadership.

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And the idea there is that in a team leaders that doing a lot more of the heavy lifting these guys and I used to

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Simply because the role of internal auditing is expanding and more and more chief ordered executives across the world and moving into the C suite so that they’re working very closely with the executives.

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Within the organization as a consequence is a lot of things that shape ordered executives used to do which get passed down the line.

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And we’ve got a great resource. But recorded executives and people in the C suite with saw his internal auditing seventh edition is, you mentioned a little earlier.

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But below that below that is there’s a gap in terms of what team leaders and given to inform them about a challenge changing role.

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So the idea of this team leaders guide you to actually help them transition into what it’s a different playing field to what they would have been used to playing

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Well, and so what what are some of those things. Now that you

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Know, like you said, because

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Because in a lot of organizations. The CIA is

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Really kind of bring being brought up.

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To the C suite level. And so they’re, they’re really are acting more like an executive in the organization. What are some of those common things now that are are kind of being put down on to the team leaders that they that they didn’t use to have to deal with necessarily

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It actually goes to lots of different parts of, you know, the internal ORDERING PROCESS process from your initial planning of the word program for the next 12 months will beyond through the engagement plan.

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And making a lot more decisions in those areas and that would have been used to doing.

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It also gets them through to shaping the internal audit team through professional development through recruitment.

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Through performance evaluations are image in the early days, it was the chief audit executive. He did all the performance prizes. Well, that’s actually been pushed down there and a lot of that work is now being performed quite appropriately by train leaders.

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So effectively what we’re trying to explore in this book is, you know, what does it mean to step into the team leader role and

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What are the things that you need to be across you know the strategic alignment talks about environmental awareness and what they need to do in that space.

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The importance of relationship management and the role that team leaders play in that space. These days, as well as not just simply a matter of going out and doing an order.

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At a Broken Hill. It’s having a much better appreciation for have a hall of the businesses operating

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maintaining relationships on a regular basis through all people within the organization. And when you do go out to remote locations. What, what additional communication and you provide to them because people in these remote locations are often often start of good information.

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I feel a bit isolated. So it’s a it’s a wonderful opportunity for team leaders to to get out there and present things

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On topics that they’re familiar with, which actually bring the people in those remote locations along in their own development as well.

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So it’s fairly wide, wide reaching in terms of what it covers and and gets into even basic things around the scheduling awarded engagements and what can you do to innovate in terms of the practices in us and

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Leveraging integrator working and then getting down to go library reports that are much more crisp than what they used to, I need to be short, sharp and see what actually covers a whole line to various use cases.

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Well, which is going to be great because I think one of

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One of the things, at least I

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I saw this with myself and you know in

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public accounting, as well as in a lot of the audit shops that I was in, we

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We usually do a very good job of teaching people how to audit. Right. And so we become very good at kind of the technical aspect to our job. But often, you know, we don’t do as much with teaching people, some of these soft skills relationships communication, some of these other stuff.

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Excuse me, that they need to

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You know, be successful as a manager as a team leader. Right. We usually, you know, kind of have promoted people based on what you’ve been here long enough you really understand how to audit.

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And sometimes there’s some of these gaps and so I think this book is going to be a great you know opportunity for people to kind of see some of those things and maybe help us, you know, more proactively prepare people or realize some of these new

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Things that are kind of placed on the team leaders and be able to help them, you know, to get some of those skills. Before we just kind of throw them in the deep end of the pool and say start swimming, you know, sort of Annex.

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Well absolutely in it. It’s pretty much about the influencing skills as well. Yeah, which is part of those soft skills, you know, how do you get people to do some of the things that I need to do. But I’d really motivated to get in and and do

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Yeah, well, and I’ve been. I’ve been preaching that now for a few

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Years, because it’s

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Yeah. To me, that is that is one of the biggest and not just career skills, but life skills that we need to learn, you know, because we’re always

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Having to do things to persuade or help kind of influence people and and and there’s there actually is kind of a scientific way.

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On how this is actually done you know what you need to do and how psychology actually works. And you know a lot of people don’t really go go down that route.

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And and we really do need to learn how to do that so that we can. One of my friends is. He’s actually one of the top experts in the world on on on this topic, and he uses the term about persuading people that are in ways that are lasting and ethical right which is

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Which I think is beautiful because it’s about

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It’s about creating the relationship and communicating and yes using psychology, because you know there’s certain things like people are much more motivated on fear of loss and they are a fear of gain right

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But, you know, if we can do it in the right way. We’re effective at accomplishing our job helping them do what they need to do. But we also are building that relationship.

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In doing it in a way that everybody sees is ethical so I’m glad I’m glad that that’s being being brought up in the book because like is that I think that’s, that is one of the things that

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Especially as auditors because we, you know, I mean, you think about anytime that you have to deliver a report or, you know, do a meeting and if we’re asking people to, you know, implement change. Don’t we have to kind of persuade them.

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You know,

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Along the whole way. And I think, you know, the audit recordings is a primary document added added any audit and some people say that is the most important you know

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Visible piece of the puzzle. But I think it’s the hard yards has been well before any audit report comes out in terms of the intellect, you apply within

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The work you’re doing delivering against the audit objectives and ultimately influencing people to

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Do some things that they didn’t recognize they needed to do. So that’s the hard yards and the report is the tool. I guess that documents, all of that. And, you know, allows people to refer back to the

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Things I needed to do in hand again to do it. Yeah.

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Yeah. Cuz if we just wait until the

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Report. It’s kind of too late. At that point, there’s a lot of things we have to do.

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Along the way, yeah.

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Absolutely, yep. They’re very wise.

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Counsel, well hey you know another thing that I wanted to just be able to kind of talk about with you as to is

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You know, to maybe kind of explain a little bit or maybe share some insights

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You know, one of the podcasts that I listened to one of his questions that he asked every, every guest. And so this is kind of my my version of it is

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You know, something to the effect of, what would you tell your 21 year old self today, right. So, like if you were 21 again or in this instance, like if you’re starting off in an internal audit career or you’re younger in your

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Career.

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You know, what are some of the things that you wish you had known lessons that you’ve learned across your career and and by being a CA that you think are important things that you’d want to share with others.

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Who are in the in this career and kind of moving up or trying to head towards that way for a long term career.

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So they’re probably three key things I’ll touch on Jason and we can expand on that, if you like.

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You know, I think one of the most important starting points is professional development and that is investing in the development of your staff, I’d much rather shave some dollars off my starting budget and reinvest that through training and development. They’re not to say

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Because we’re relying on their auditors being credible and the the eyes and the ears of the chief audit executive. So that’s one part of it. And the other part of the professional development is your own commitment to maintaining

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Skills.

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That you need for your particular role so professional development for me as a starting point. The other thing that I’ll touch on now.

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Things that I wasn’t aware of until I became the chief audit executive and when I did I was I was holding a very senior position in internal audit and

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I had never actually been to an audit committee meeting so its first order committee meeting. I went to, I was the chief audit executive. Can I actually didn’t know how they operate, which in some respects was a good thing because I could go in and naively start changing

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Things to the way that I thought I should operate and that proved to be quite a good thing, but I hadn’t actually attended complete an order committee meeting until I was in that actually from

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The second thing in this conversation that I wanted to throw out there was around the risk of Chief ordered executives to go into an organization.

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With a transformation agenda and it’s a really difficult thing at the best of times

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But there’s a lot of people within that organization and even within the internal audit team, you actually don’t want the changes that you’re there to implement. So what can happen is that they can be Washington

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Of the things you’re trying to do. So you actually need to be acutely aware of that as a risk.

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And when things do start coming for you gotta be ready to address them and address them fairly quickly. Well, yeah. And that actually actually because

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When you say that it just a couple of different experiences that I had in my career just popped into my head and that is

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I’ve seen this, not just from chief executives, but other executives that I’ve worked with and coached over the years to

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Is there there is like you said it, it is a real risk. You know, when you go into a new position like that. I mean, obviously we’re the new

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The new executive in town. We want to show everybody that we know what we’re talking about, you know, that we that we understand and we can create this transformation.

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But a lot of times, like you said, even in the best of times, it’s a very difficult thing to do.

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And inevitably, a lot of times when people go into aggressive and try to be too quick without really understanding the culture.

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They really end up getting themselves in trouble. I mean, I just, just to illustrate like one one story when I early earlier in my career right when I was considering leaving public accounting

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I remember interviewing with Chief audit executive who he was new in his role.

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And he was kind of explaining, you know, like you said, This transformational agenda, kind of like what you’re talking about.

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And I remember him him saying some things like, oh, you know, the I doesn’t know what they’re talking about this. That’s not what internal out, it’s going to be. I’m going to create

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The best, you know, world class internal audit thing. And I don’t think they know what they’re talking about you.

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Effectively is kind of what he was saying. And I remember sitting in the interview going, Oh my gosh, guys. First off, I’m not going to work for you anyway. But, you know, a year later.

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Because I kind of followed what happened like I didn’t have a job right.

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Yeah, it is. It

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Is you end up sometimes really kind of

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cutting your legs off, you know,

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You know, by, by trying to be that way and not really understanding the culture not using those influence techniques that we were talking about before that you so need at that at that at that point. So anyway. Sorry, I just I just said flashback.

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So, and I think it’s important to share these things chosen because

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It’s easy to go into these roles and think it’s all

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You know, nice and pleasant, and so forth. But he can actually be very, very challenging. And it can be very emotionally draining. I mean, you might have the right technical skills, you might have the right soft skills to do the job.

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But it’s the difficulty of dealing with really, really hard situations that often, you know, the people haven’t had to deal with at any time in a career. Yeah.

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Well, and it is, I mean,

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And I guess.

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I guess the key, the key there is understanding that there’s people within the organization or within the profession that you can talk to and make sure you do that and you know if you can, if you can get a good case in a good mentor.

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Well, and that and that is so important. I mean, that’s you know because I experienced that, too. You know, like I said, where I

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You know your your story of kind of showing up and it was your first audit audit committee meeting. I mean I had

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It wasn’t with the audit committee, but I had similar experiences like that where all of a sudden, I’m thrown into a situation. This is the first time I’ve ever had to deal with it right and and like you said, it is

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You know, a lot of times we think, oh, when I finally become chief audit executive, then everything is going to be easy. I’m going to be making all this money and

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Everybody else is going to be doing the work. And it’s like,

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You know if you think that stop right it’s it’s a tough job. There’s a reason why you get paid what you get paid. And why why it takes you so long to get there because it is challenging. And you do have to reach out

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Have mentors.

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You know, maybe, maybe join groups peer groups, other things like that to be able to try to get the support because

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It’s a hard job to do by yourself.

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And most of the time the things you’re going through you’ve never experienced before. So you have no idea really how to respond and you’re hoping you know that you’re making the right choice, but it’s so much nicer to be able to

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You know, refer to or talk back to somebody else and kind of bounce ideas off of them and and make sure what you’re doing. So you don’t go in and do

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What we always used to call a career limiting move right. You never want to do a CLS career limiting move and, you know, the more help, and that you can get from mentors or others, the less likely you are to actually encounter one of those

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And that’s very true. And I think, you know, chief executive and internal auditing is a very fulfilling career. And so we’re not sort of trying to paint gloom and doom.

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People if people need to be aware that there are some challenges. But once you’ve confronted those challenges and navigated them successfully.

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You get a lot of joy out of the work that you do. Oh, yeah, yeah.

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It’s a, it’s a very rewarding career.

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Like you said, you just obviously it’s like with

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Anything new right i mean anytime you’re learning something new. There’s the, the change and, you know, stuff that you have to go through on that so

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All right, well, I know we kind of started a little sidetracked on that one. But you said there was kind of a third thing then to that you were, you know,

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Trying to think about this.

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As well that you

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Want to make sure that people were aware of, too.

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And I think that’s very much around the direction of the internal audit function, you know, what is it that you want to achieve and make sure that you have a shared vision.

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With the chief executives and with the audit committee and if that’s World Class, Order team, you need to understand what that actually means.

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What of applying such a need to put in clients. So once you’ve got a clear idea of your vision. It’s then making sure that you develop a strategic roadmap.

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That identify what you are going to do within internal audit over the next 12 months, two years, three years to get to the position.

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That provision needs to take you to, and there are so many different elements involved in that and the timing is really critical in terms of

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Different elements. So if you’re moving down the path of great automation of your Your order will you need to actually invest in the training with your people.

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Whether it’s one of the software solutions for cats like ACL when you’re going to to adopt particularly hot official intelligence. What does that mean,

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When are you going to do it. What are you going to do it on. There’s a whole range of things that you need to prepare on day one, or what you can deliver in in YouTube. Will you through

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So I think that’s the next thing that’s really important to me. Jason is having vision and having the strategic roadmap that’s going to take you where the water committee and the chief executive wants you to be in a couple years contract.

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Yeah, and I think that’s, that’s actually it’s a really good point to for people

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That are there interviewing for positions, right, whether whether again it’s for a CA role or whether

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It’s a role within an audit.

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Department is for you to really kind of clearly understand what that vision is and what that role actually entails at that company.

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Because I think some, you know, sometimes we kind of almost get the feeling, or at least I can I get this from some people that I talked to that, you know, it’s like it’s like we want to go in and be a world class or, you know,

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Audit organization at every organization. It’s like, well, that’s not really how it works. Right. I mean, internal audit looks a little bit different. At every organization in every industry, it’s a little bit different. And so, you know, you have to, like you said, kind of line up with

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The vision of what that is and is this something that you actually

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Want to do right

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Because if you if you want to be a part of a world class audit function, then you need to make sure that you’re working for an organization where the board and the executives also want there to be a world class auditing organization. If not, you’re going to be really frustrated

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You know in in that whole thing too. And I think sometimes

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We

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We don’t stop to realize or recognize the internal auditing looks different around the world and different within different organizations.

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Even it does. And the other element is critical to the success is bringing your staff along, making sure that you’ve got their commitment and their capability to the vision and that they can contribute to the journey so that you can actually set yourself up for success.

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Well, and sometimes that’s where

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You know that I’ve, I’ve seen both in my career and other people that

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I’ve that I’ve worked with or talked with is

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You know, like that when you when you do change the vision or the direction you have to bring people along but some of those people may not

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Come along in the journey right because some of those people may not want what that future is and

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You know, sometimes those are some of the hard decisions that you have to make as well. But yeah, and this kind of goes back again to your first thing on professional development right is if if we want to get to a certain point, it

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Probably means

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Either either we need some new people to help in getting to that point, we need to develop the people that we do have, you know, we’ve got to use the influence and other stuff to try to to work, both within our team and within the organization to be able to help us get there so

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Very, very wise counsel.

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It’s, it’s like you’ve done this a

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Few times

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I haven’t failed and, you know, towards the end, it’s something you look back on with criteria because you’re actually leaving a legacy, not just within that organization, but

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Other people pick up on the good things that have been done and try to mirror those in the right organization. So it’s actually quite rewarding Jason

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Well,

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It is, and I’m glad that you brought that up because I know

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It is a very rewarding profession in general, I mean that’s why I’ve loved kind of being in this space and why I’m here.

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But it’s it’s it’s not just you know the value that we can provide to the organizations, but it’s it’s also what we do for the other people. Right. I mean, some of the people that I’ve worked with will be

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lifelong friends because of some of the stuff that we’ve gone through and their impact on me and perhaps my impact on them.

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And, you know, gotta gotta keep keep keep that bigger that bigger personal vision as well. And I mean, obviously, you get it. Bruce you keep giving back even though you’ve

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Moved on right you’re still, you’re still giving to the profession.

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You know, and trying to help help others that are out there. So I know I for 1am very, very grateful to have you in our profession, so

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Alright. So with that, Bruce. Thank you for coming on today. I really appreciated having you on with me to go through and talk about this and any, any final thoughts that you’d like to leave.

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I think we lost Bruce

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He Jason I just dropped out for a minute.

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Okay.

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We’re back, you’re back. Okay.

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I’m just have a little edit in the middle there.

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Alright, so, so, Bruce I really, really appreciate you coming on and talking today i mean the the

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The information that you’ve given what you’ve given back to the profession is so great. And, you know, I’m, I’m actually really, really happy and grateful to have you in the profession and and you know having you share what you are sharing with everybody unselfishly. So thank you.

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Thank you, Jason and Jane Fonda. I guess describe this is last that once you reach

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What are you going to be doing.

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That

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And familiar, it’s really important to do those things that you’re saying, You’ve got to have a clear path in retirement and and have a clear retire plan and and part of that should be to bring the next generation of

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Business people along, including the internal order, guys. Yeah.

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Well, and that’s exactly what you’re doing. So, so, yeah, kind of as a you know again reminder for everybody listening. If you haven’t already, go out, grab Bruce’s book new auditors guide to internal auditing.

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Really good good resource and be looking for this new team leaders book that he’s working on right now.

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Should be out. I’m guessing probably sometime in 2020

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Would be the plan for it. Right.

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It should be added a fourth quarter 20 2013 kids plan.

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Alright, sweet. Look forward to actually seeing that and

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Yeah. Again, Bruce. Thanks for coming on with me today and really appreciate it.

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Thanks. Jason little Good night. Alright, see ya.

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Bye bye.

Let’s face it. Internal audit can be a very stressful job, which is why on this episode we discuss yoga and breathing as tools to help center yourself, reduce your stress, and increase your productivity as an auditor.

You may be asking: “how can yoga help me be a better auditor?” Listen in and you will find out the answer, along with practical tips for how you can do little activities during the day (even as little as 5-90 seconds at a time) to help you become more aware, make better decisions, reduce stress and improve your productivity.

Mindful activities (like yoga) are one of the often overlooked tools that can make you into a super auditor. In fact, what we discuss is also used by elite military special forces to help them perform better in the field. If it helps them, it can also help you.

I’m joined by Kurt Weirich who is the Director, Office of the Internal Auditor at Pima Community College in Tucson Arizona. In addition to being a career auditor, he is also a registered yoga teacher, RYT-200 with Yoga Alliance, the largest global yoga organization. Kurt has started local yoga groups at Pima Community College as well as his local home owners association, so he knows a lot about yoga and helping to create a space for mindful practices in our communities and workplaces.

Kurt is also the President Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA) Tucson Chapter, the Membership Director ISACA Tucson Chapter, and is the designated representative for the College at the Association of College and University Auditors (ACUA), a professional organization comprised of audit, compliance and risk professionals. Kurt also has earned professional auditor certifications and compliance designations including Certified Internal Auditor (CIA), Certified Information Security Auditor (CISA), Payment Card Industry Professional (PCIP), and Certified HIPAA Professional (CHP).

Transcript

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Well welcome my friends to another episode of jammin with Jason. Now today, you might be wondering yoga. Yoga and internal audit. What does that have to do with

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Internal audit. Well, I’m excited to have Kurt why Rick with me today and Kurt and I met at the International Conference. So I did a breakout session.

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And it was around mindfulness and emotional intelligence Kurt was in the audience, and afterwards came up and we started talking and I was like, Ooh, we got to have him on here so Kurt, welcome.

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Thank you, Jason. Great to be with you. Thank you.

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So it’s, it’s kind of funny because I’ll give you a little opportunity to kind of explain some of the stuff that you’re doing. But you know, I remember after after the session you came up and you said, Hey, you know what, actually I teach yoga, right, because in yoga is a mindful.

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Practice.

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That’s correct.

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That people can do. And I know a lot of times, sometimes people might say, well, what does yoga, have to do with internal audit. So maybe I’ll pose that back to you. Right. And maybe you can kind of share

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A little bit about how you kind of came to it, how you use it as a tool to help you and help others. And I’ll share a little bit too about, you know, some of the mindful stuff that I’ve done, and

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I haven’t really done yoga. So I’m really actually kind of interested to understand more about what you’re doing as well.

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Certainly. Well, thank you, Jason. And thank you for the opportunity to be on your show today. I really appreciate that. So thank you for this.

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I’d be glad to chat about yoga with you. Really the question that you posed is internal audit and yoga, how do those go together. That’s, that’s an. That’s an excellent question.

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It I’m first of all, I’m an internal auditor. I’m the director of office of the internal auditor at Pima Community College, which is located in Tucson, Arizona Southern Arizona.

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And I’m a department of one. And so in that role in as all internal auditors who are listening to this today know the role of internal auditor can be stressful. And the question is,

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What exactly

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It may not be surprising to you, but to others.

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It may be new information, but let me tell you, it can be very stressful. So, especially when you’re one individual as well. So the question is, what are some techniques that are healthy, that you could utilize to basically

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Mitigate that situation and and one of one of those in my case is the activity of yoga. So I have found that over the years as a student, and now I’m in

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Yoga Instructor as well at the college so I teach employees, but how it relates to internal audit as it permits you to be mindful and in the present moment.

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And so what that means is you’re focused on if there’s an audit issue that you’re looking at, you’re much more focused

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In that moment, and whether it’s having an audit interview with the audit client.

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You are more engaged, you’re not thinking about what you have to eat for lunch today, you’re thinking about who’s in front of me.

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What is the topic and what is it that we want to accomplish. But the key is being mindful and in the present moment and and yoga is useful in many ways to get to that place.

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And you can do it through movement but yoga is primarily about the breath. So you really focus on your breath work.

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And it allows you to really engage again with the moment because that’s the only thing we have is our moment. So when you’re in an audit you may be thinking, Hey, I have to issue a report or I have a meeting with

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A president coming up later that could be true, but you’re, you need to be engaged with what you’re doing right now. And it really as an auditor. It makes you more effective and more efficient as I described my role I say I’m small but mighty I’m one power of one

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Yo yoga makes me more powerful. So it allows you to really come back to the moment

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Yeah. Excuse me.

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Yeah, because I think that that’s an important thing. And that’s why I’ve been talking a lot more about this.

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Especially the last few years because I’ve kind of gone through a journey myself. I mean, I was the chief audit executive a few times.

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I’ve been in the profession for many, many years, and it is a stressful job right. And I think a lot of times people don’t don’t want to admit that.

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It is stress, there is stress that goes on, you know, sometimes we try to internalize it and think, oh, you know, I can separate work from my personal life. Honestly, that’s garbage. Right. You can’t actually do

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That, that’s correct. And I think, I think the piece is it’s we live in a society we live in a community.

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I work at a community college so that what that means is we’re engaged with the community. So, for example, I’m president of the Institute of internal auditors to San chapter here locally and I engage with the community through that forum. Right.

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And and most of our obviously our members are primarily internal auditors or compliance professionals are risk professionals.

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And I see a tremendous amount of stress when I attend those meetings and in the purposes, obviously, to provide some information retraining, etc.

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But I’ve been approached several different times to say Kurt, could you provide a yoga practice to prior to the training and so there’s an absolute need. And I think recognizing it and becoming aware of that need is, is the first step.

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Yeah. Well, and I think it’s interesting because I’ll share, share a little bit about me, then maybe two in this, in this instance, because, well, we’re both going to kind of get a little bit personal

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I think so it’s, you know, because again, I mean, growing up as a as a as an auditor in that profession right we’re taught to be very logical very prescriptive very

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Almost robotic sometimes in some of the stuff that we do. And again, I’ve always had kind of like a side passion with psychology

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And how the mind works neurobiology, all this kind of stuff and and there’s there’s really kind of this movement in the last

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1015 years on positive psychology and about some of the things instead of just trying to focus on fixing

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The bad things of trying to incorporate things and that are actually good for us.

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And what’s interesting, you know, because again, I mean, when a lot. And I’m sure a lot of people listening to this are going yoga, who were all sitting down on the ground and Lotus pose. And we’re like,

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You know, kind of a thing. Or we’re meditating and and that a lot of those stigmas or the the the belief around that really kind of goes back to, you know, like

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A lot of people say, oh, that’s hippy dippy kind of stuff right that’s that’s what the hippies did in the 60s, right, that

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That’s all like Eastern religion, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Kind of stuff right but science is actually caught up and they’ve actually done a lot of research and guess what that hippy dippy stuff is actually backed by science.

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That’s right. Exactly. That’s right. And I think you you hit on a key component that it is it is effective it is. It is.

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Absolutely, something that works. So internal auditors listening to this today.

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Yoga does work, and it will help you do your job better and, for example, it’s, you don’t have to just be an internal auditor. You could also be an staff employee. I teach

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At Pima community college to employees as part of our wellness program. So I actually taught last night.

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And it helps with stress. Even if you’re not an internal auditor, there are folks who are dealing with stressful positions that are maybe in different fields but internal auditors can use these tools. It’s a tool.

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And it’s, it’s a way, it’s a way of dealing with the stress of what we have to deal with. And it’s effective. So I agree with, I support what you’re saying it’s valid it’s valid. So someone’s going to question it. Is it all about

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You know, in terms of just meditation or something of that nature. No, it’s deeper than that. And you can do it in your office, and that’s something I wanted to mention is that

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People say, Well, I have to go to a yoga studio or have to know you don’t, you can absolutely do it in your office, you can do it when you’re conducting audit fieldwork.

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You can do it in your car so you can. It’s a tool that will make you a much stronger internal auditor. So it does work. Yeah.

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Well, and I think that’s an important thing. And before. Before we get off, you know, one of the things that I’m going to want to do as

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Well, we’ll talk about actually like some practical things that people can actually do, like you said in your car in your office, you know, while you’re doing your work.

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Because, again, this isn’t something where you have to go sit glued yourself off for hours at a time.

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There’s actually some little practical things that you can do. And I know we talked a little bit about breathing crab. And so I was so we’ll share some of that stuff too, because I know in the in that

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In that presentation that a speech that I gave it international conference we talked about that. That’s right. And we had that discussion afterwards, too. And so I want to, I want to get more into that but

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Before we go there. I thought it’s it’s interesting, you know, like you said, You’re, you’re the internal auditor you’re working there at the college right you have a day job you’re doing this but

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There’s people that are asking you, hey, can we do some of this, you know, work, whether that’s at the beginning of the

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Chapter meeting you know like you teach and last night and I think there’s this trend that I’m seeing so i i actually personally went to the

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Play a more mindful workplace summit last year, right. So this is a summit where huge companies. I mean, we’re talking like Google sap. I mean, you name some of the biggest companies in the world.

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They were all they’re talking about how they are providing space.

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At their company during the workday or after the work day for people to engage in mindful practices.

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Like guided meditation or yoga or some of these other things and the benefits that they’re actually experiencing and the money that they’re investing into it. So, so, you know, maybe, maybe talk a little bit about some of that, you know, because I

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Think

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One of the takeaways for people to can obviously be for us to create space for people to be able to do some of these things during the workday. Right.

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Right, and that’s a good question. And so you can actually, as I mentioned, you can do this in your car, you can do it in your office, you don’t have to have a necessarily a designated space to do this. So for example, we talked about breathing, and I think that is something we do

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We have to breathe.

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We’re hoping we’re breathing. Right.

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It’s something that permits us to become back into the moment. So it may involve, for example, counting our breaths. And that’s something you and I talked about at the International Conference. Yeah. And so

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I believe it all starts with awareness of that the fact that maybe when you’re in the audit interview, for example, you’re feeling. Maybe it’s you potentially could be in a stressful situation.

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You notice you’re becoming more shallow in your breath. And that’s where you can take a moment and pause and I think it’s fine to take a pause in our audit work. You do not have to

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Immediately rushed into something if you’re, if you have not centered yourself as the description that I use. Yeah, so that the tool of

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It could. It could be your breath. It could also be an object. So for example, if there’s something on your desk, because most of us have

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Some object that you could potentially focus upon could be a pencil. It could be whatever that is. Bring your mind to one point to a centering and that will assist you.

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And that doesn’t require any special equipment, but it makes you a better auditor because you’re back into this moment, and you’re

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You’re using all of your senses, you’re using all of your mental powers that we’ve been trained as an auditor to use

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You’re using them more effectively. And so I see tremendous benefit using this, and certainly movement as part of it and and one of the things we can do is, for example, instead of a lot of times we sit too much in society today so sitting is the new smoking.

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So sometimes what you can do as an auditor is you don’t you don’t necessarily have to set

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You could stand you can take a walk, you could say, Hey, let’s have a walking meeting, let’s let’s move over here. And that’s a form of yoga because it’s movement. And so it doesn’t have to be a formal practice of

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Getting into for example, downward facing dog in the audit meeting. That’s not what it is.

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And you wouldn’t do that during

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The I would not recommend that I would not recommend that. But it’s basically an awareness of bringing your you’re aware of your body you’re aware of your sensations, you feel

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Connected and i think that’s that’s where we can work as internal auditors is to connect with our clients because we’re dealing with people.

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And people. It’s a soft skill, but it’s absolutely critical, because how do things get done, they get done through people. And so I think developing that comfort within yourself and a connection. I think yoga is a, it’s a bridge to doing that.

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Well, I think one of the things that you brought up is, it’s about awareness. Right, right.

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And so, you know, we won’t get into all this stuff today. I’m sure I’ll talk about it again. But I know one of the things I shared it International Conference was literally your brain has brainwaves right

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And the slower your brainwaves are the more relaxed and calm. We are, in fact, the better decisions. We can make

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The better we can learn the better we can remember right and and if you are aware, and you notice your brainwave activity going up. And so again, right, you

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You something triggers you, you start to feel more anxious, you start to feel more whatever what’s happening is literally your brainwaves are starting to speed up

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And when that happens, we need to kind of slow it back down. And that’s what you’re talking about, from the centering

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Is whether we we choose to focus, maybe, and just stare at an object for 30 seconds if we do some breathing exercises and again. Right. So the one I talked about there was was breathing and counting rights.

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Practically, you know, you try to, you try to be aware of the breath. You just count your breath in, or count your breath out. That’s right. And you just try to slow down count for for a little bit. I usually get distracted by the time I get to five. So I start over again at one

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X right

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And that’s, that’s one way to do it. Another one that I did that I didn’t share that I thought I’d share today is one called tactical breathing.

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Or it’s also called box breathing in, in, in some of the meditative practices. Now it’s called tactical breathing because navy seals and other special ops.

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People use this in the field, right. So this is like hard core stuff yes and and with with that with tactical breathing. You think 4444 okay so four fours.

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And what it is is you breathe in through your nose for four seconds you hold it for four seconds.

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You release out through your mouth for four seconds and then you hold for four seconds before you. Breathe in again. And so you’re just counting to yourself in increments of four. And you do that for 60 to 90 seconds and everything is okay. Right. So again, imagine like a navy seal.

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As you’re out.

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In the field and all of a sudden, everything breaks loose and they stop and they breathe. So I can control themselves again and move on. It’s the same thing if you’re in an interview or something like that right now.

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And it’s right.

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Go to timeout. I need right seconds.

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That’s right.

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That’s right, yeah. So these are things that we can actually implement as auditors and I think the the piece that’s kind of the take home message is that

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It does work. And that’s what you’re stating, and I think that’s critical that

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There is, as you mentioned, it’s a, I guess, yoga does have a reputation that it might be a little bit out there. And one of the messages. I’d like to communicate today is that you can be an audit professional

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And still practice and it could be in my, in my case I’m selecting yoga as an activity that helps me, but you could also do other things. So I also golf, for example.

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And in the moment. Could that could that be meditative. Could that be a yoga practice. The answer is yes.

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Because when you’re in theory, you’re focusing on a on a small object. In this case it’s a golf ball, and you’re going to be hitting that and so for a period of seconds.

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You will be focused upon that particular object and task and that is a meditative thing and that and we all need to be refreshed and that’s something I wanted to share is that

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I think as auditors, you can just get into a rut, and you’re just constantly in a high pressure very difficult position.

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It can really where I knew, and you need to find a mechanism that works in terms of just refreshing yourself and it could look different for different people. So it could be golf.

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It could be fishing, it could be running marathons. It could be yoga. It could be something that you like to do in your in your time. So it’s an activity.

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To balance work life balance, it’s a balance of what we do on our typical day. It allows us to be more effective and recharged and moving forward in a positive direction. And I think that’s really critical. Yeah.

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Well, so, so let’s talk a little bit about yoga specifically because, again, I mean, I’ve been doing mindful practices for a long time. I choose to do. I’ve chosen to do other ones right like

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Right you know hypnosis sessions daily meditation, you know,

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I use music. A lot of times as as a way for me to kind of go to some of those spaces or, like you said, the staring at the objects. The breathing the different things like that.

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Yes, but and

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But I’ve done yoga, a few times. And so one of the things that I wanted to do is, is talk a little bit about kind of the process.

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And demystify this a little bit because I know, like I said, when I went to the mindful workplace summit, I thought, you know what, here I am in this

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You know, beautiful retreat center in Northern California. I might as well take advantage and try to immerse myself as much as I can.

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And the different activities that they’re providing so I did like a sound bath, which is effectively like, you know, a meditation for, I think it was an hour, where somebody is using

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These, these bowls to create vibration and you can literally like feel it like going around the room and going through your body, which is very fascinating.

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But I, but I did, I did a yoga class as well that was actually the first time that I had done a yoga class. Sure, so you know when, as a teacher, when when people are starting out. Sure. What are maybe some of the things that they’re they’re worried about or that are going through their mind.

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And certainly

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You know that might kind of get them.

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To not to not want to do it.

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You know, it’s like

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Let’s just share with people. What kind of goes through your mind.

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Sure, yeah.

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Absolutely I would say a couple things. You’re right. It does.

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There are some I would describe it as stereotypes or stigmas related to yoga, that certainly from an internal auditor perspective that you might have. And I would say, first of all,

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You don’t necessarily have to be necessarily an athlete to do yoga. And I think that’s one of the that’s one stereotype, I would like to address. And what I mean by that is

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You as long as you have the ability to move something of your body, which we all have some limited movement generally

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We can we can do. And I think that is sufficient. So in other words, where you start where you are. You use what you have and you move forward. So

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I would not be intimidated, in terms of going into a yoga class here and you’re especially as a beginner, you’re not going to be the expert. And I want to mention this yoga is a practice if anyone tells you, they’ve arrived. You want to immediately leave

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And tell them I do not want to talk to you.

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I continue I continuously learn just like an internal auditing, I go to conferences, I’ll be attending the COO Association of College and university auditors conference in Baltimore here in a couple weeks.

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You continuously learn whether it’s yoga or internal auditing. So the bottom line is you have an instructor. When you start

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And I think you need to go into it with a student mindset. So you’re an expert as an internal auditor you’re comfortable with that.

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Yoga, maybe a new concept for you. So when you’re going in, go in with a beginner’s mind go in and and so in other words, you’re not going to be an expert and that’s okay. So in other words, even if I’m getting some

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Movement in terms of, we call it asanas or yoga poses. So for example, you mentioned downward facing dog. You may not necessarily have the best technique.

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But that doesn’t matter. It’s not a competition, it’s, it’s something that you are developing just like an internal auditing right

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You’re not necessary you continuously learn. We make mistakes and mistakes are okay. So I would suggest going into into into yoga.

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As a beginner’s mind in it’s okay not to know everything. It’s okay to experiment, try new things.

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Different. Different movement and don’t here’s here’s something that I have found to be useful as

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It’s not a competition, you’re not, don’t look at your neighbor, who’s maybe been practicing for 20 years

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It’s just like an internal audit. There’s an audit director and there may be a staff auditor who’s been there for 15 minutes. I mean, it’s going to have different levels. Right. But we can still

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Do things together, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to be at the same competency level, but that’s okay. So I would go into it with a beginner’s mind. And I would say it’s it’s going to take practice, but you never arrive. So at the end of the story. We’re just developing ourselves.

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Well, no, because that was kind of, you know, my ex my experience when I went into this class. Right. You know, I mean, I looked at the schedule and thought, hey, you know what, okay. Tomorrow morning, instead of going on my morning walk or run

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Why don’t I go to this 630 yoga class right now. I didn’t know when I pack that I was going to a yoga class. Okay, right. So, so here I was, you know, in a show up in my, in my sweats, you know, because that’s kind of what I packed, you know, and obviously

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You know I get there. I’m the only man in the room. Correct. Today, Ryan. And again, most of these women have been doing yoga for a while. I mean, they show up in the whole yoga gear all their yoga pants and everything else. Correct.

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That’s right. That’s right.

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And I’m kind of looking around, like, Okay, I know I’m a little out of place, but I’m still going to give this a try. Yeah.

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Yeah, I would. I would mention for me personally, that’s a good point because I am

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I am a male yoga instructor and that is not the norm. So typically when you enter a class. It’s typically more on the female but but

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In that’s fine, but it’s just there is definitely, that is that is what it is. So there are very few

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Men instructors or typically that participate, but don’t allow that to intimidate you. If you’re an internal auditor listening to this podcast right now to not attend. Because I can tell you

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As a, as a, it’s been very beneficial to me as an internal auditor. Give it a try. It may be, it may be, you may be uncomfortable, but you can be. You can be comfortable with uncertainty. It’s okay. So I’m telling you.

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That’s actually one of life’s biggest lessons.

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That’s, that’s right. And so it does take courage to walk into a yoga class for the first time.

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And it is uncomfortable, but that’s just like doing an audit the first time that you, you may be interviewing someone and you may feel uncomfortable until you develop rapport, or a relationship.

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That is, it’s part of life and you just have to say, Okay, I’m going to give myself permission to try and I think that is critical and

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I know Nike has the famous phrase, just do it. And I would say just do it and I highly encourage folks who are listening to this and I needed some encouragement as well. My

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Uncle is. He’s retired now, but he was an executive who traveled extensively coastal type jobs worked lived in New York travel to California BACK AND FORTH, IT FOR HIS POSITION extremely stressful.

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He suggested initially that Kurt I think yoga might be something that would be

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You might be interested in. I needed his permission. So I’m giving permission to folks who are listening to this that if you’re, you know, if you’re a male internal auditor. It’s okay to try this.

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And if you’re a female internal auditor your I recommend it as well. So the bottom line is, it is something that works. And so I encourage you to get over your discomfort and do it.

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Well, and I think, again, you know, like, like you were talking about. Don’t worry about what other people are doing, you just focus on yourself. I mean, yoga in any of these mindful practices really kind of like golf.

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Right, it’s. It’s about you. It’s not about everybody else. And so, you know, just like what you said, because I went through that, that my first yoga session. Right.

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And it was an hour and you know what some of the things were a little hard and I was swaying around a little bit and I couldn’t reach as far and I couldn’t do whatever, right, because I’m a middle aged man. That’s a little overweight.

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But

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But what was interesting is, is at the end of it, right, is there were there were several the people in the room that even came over and they’re like, hey, you did good. You did a good job, you know, and it’s like

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This is my first time. And they’re like, Oh, you did amazing for your first time, you know, kind of thing. And it’s like they’re not judging you.

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That’s, that’s correct.

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Right. Everybody’s they’re learning. And I think the point that you brought up before to about any of these things being a practice. That’s right. That was one of the things I wanted to talk about because there’s kind of two

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Two terms that come out a lot. A lot of people would ask me, you know, like when I showed up there. They’re like, so do you have a daily practice and I’m like daily practice right talking about right.

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Right.

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Right well daily practice just means right that you’re practicing and doing these things every day. It’s, it’s not some you know that’s that’s what people mean by it, right, because at first.

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I was, I was kind of like scratching my head like what are you talking about

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That’s right.

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You know, so that’s what, that’s one thing again to throw the mystique out on that. The other one is usually at the, at the end of the session. Right. There’s the mistake.

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Yes, that’s correct. And so again, you know, that’s a term that a lot of people see and there’s kind of the whole hand gestures with kind of battling correct maybe just explain that to people what that means and and that might be something different that they’re used to.

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Absolutely and and it’s important to know the history and yoga it it’s based in Sanskrit and so if you go back in time in the history of yoga.

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There are going to be basically terms that are not necessarily something that your first time you’re attending. You may not be comfortable with. But nama stay

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Is really the light in me is honoring the light in you and so nama stay is a form of acknowledgement that I’m honoring you your presence here.

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I connect with you I’m honoring you and that’s it’s it’s it’s not necessarily mystical, but it is a way of connecting and in terms of bowing it’s respect. You’re respecting yourself. YOU’RE RESPECTING

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The others that are your students that are with you, your fellow students. It’s a sign of respect. So the bowing is

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My wife is from Thailand, which is in Southeast Asia, and they are primarily Buddhists. But one of the things they have is

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Basically a. Why are they bow, and it’s a sign of respect. So when you’re in yoga you you bow to yourself you bow to your instructor you’re showing respect for the practice, you’ve taken time out of your day. We’re very busy as professional internal auditors extremely

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Stressful positions, etc. But you are honoring yourself you’re honoring your fellow classmates that you are investing in yourself and it’s going to come out in many, many ways it’s not just

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At work, it’s going to be at home when you’re dealing with your if you have a significant other spouse.

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Etc. Your neighbors. I also teach yoga in my neighborhood. I live.

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In Oro Valley, which is a suburb of Tucson, and I teach my neighbors. And that’s something that is very valuable in terms of the connection of honoring your neighbors, you’re honoring others so nama stay is a sign of respect and honoring others.

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Well, and I think it’s, it’s a beautiful term to me because like you said, what the literal actual meaning of it is, right, is that that Sanskrit word

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But, but it’s but it’s, I think it encompasses kind of the whole feel with any of these mindful practices, you might be doing is

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You’re honoring yourself and you’re honoring others are taking the time out of your day to have a daily practice and try to improve yourself and improve the world and make everything around you better

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Right.

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And I think there’s just a lot of beauty that comes with that and the whole sense of community that goes along with it too. Right.

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I agree, and they typically sometimes you’ll hear the term Sangha, or your community, your fellow classmates. So it’s a really a community.

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I work at a community college. And what does that mean well, it means you interact with everyone. And that’s true in our lives.

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So as internal auditors, we played. We all have different roles.

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You’re an internal auditor, you’re a professional very stressful but you also have your also maybe a brother or a sister or etc. We all have different roles that we experience in our lives.

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So I or a neighbor, of course, things of that nature. But community is really, really important. And I think that’s what internal audit can do as well as be a bridge amongst departments. That’s for example at the college

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I view internal audit as a resource to the Pima Community College. So it’s sometimes I’m the bridge that I can sort of, for example, when you do an audit you may have silos folks that kind of do their thing and a particular department.

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I’m sure

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I’m sure fellow auditors are listening.

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Yeah, oh yeah I relate to that. So it allows you to bring the community together, whether it’s your organization, whether it’s your neighborhood, etc. But it. It’s a way of crossing and developing bridges and connections. Yeah.

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Well, and like usual. We get to talk in and it’s so great and all of a sudden the time goes quicker than we want. So I wanted to just kind of wrap up, just last couple of minutes so

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In just kind of summarize or remind people about some of the things we’ve talked about and then give you an opportunity to maybe

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You know interject. Any other suggestions. Because like you said these are things we can do during the day, right, obviously, you know, one thing you can do is sign up and go to a yoga class.

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That’s right, absolutely. You know, but there’s other things you can do with your breathing with focusing on objects, even just for a short period of time to be able to help center yourself.

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That’s what what are some of these things like this that that you suggest people do kind of, you know, every day, or are these little things that you can do.

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Even if it’s just 510 30 seconds, a minute, you know, right, you able to help them kind of get that centering and reduce their stress levels.

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Yeah, absolutely. I think, first of all, is awareness and so I think really one of the things that

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I typically do is set an intention for the day. So this is a yoga practice that you can you can use in your internal audit life. So for example, I set an intention prior to walking into my office every day. I will say,

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Today I will be outstanding and that’s my intention today that’s that’s before I even walked through the door. And so I recommend to internal auditors listening to this.

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set an intention, and that’s a yoga practice I each class I start with I have an intention for my class.

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That doesn’t mean you have to accept it. You set your own intention, be a critical thinker internal auditors are critical thinkers

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Think for yourself. What is your intention today. And so you can use that in your in your daily life, and I think

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The other is definitely focusing on our breath and that doesn’t take necessarily that long. It could be counting to five.

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It could take just less than a minute and you’re going to definitely be more centered and it doesn’t take equipment.

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I think also, I would recommend touching base with your, your employer if they offer some sort of wellness program Pima Community College offers that to employees, free of charge.

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And that’s something that would be worth checking out. But, but also in your community. There’s yoga studios.

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You could sign up for a class, you don’t have to commit. You can just sign up for one class and typically they have sometimes they’re free. The first class is free.

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As a new student. So I highly recommend that. And if you go to the first class, and it’s not what your expectations thought it might be

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Don’t give up. You can try another one. So it’s just like when you buy a new car, you don’t necessarily purchase the first car that you drive you may have you want to do some test drives. That’s not what I would say do

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Find a studio that you like. Find a studio that meets your needs. It’s just like

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In your life. You all have preferences. Like what’s your favorite color. You know, you may like red. I may like blue, but it meets your needs. So experiment. Try different yoga studios and I’m going to suggest that

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Maybe give yourself six months. So say hey, I’m just going to try this for six months. If it doesn’t work.

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Then you could choose to do something else. Maybe golf is your thing, maybe, maybe, you know, running marathons. Is your thing, but at least don’t have regrets. I’m a highly recommending. Give it, give yoga try. Yeah.

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Well, and I think, too, because as you were as you were saying there too. I thought, you know, maybe it kind of wrap up with one of the things that I just thought about to was

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So I told you I was at the mindful workplace summit and there and and one of the biggest questions. Everybody was asking is, how can how can we bring this into the workplace. Right. And over and over again. I heard this. I mean, you’ve kind of brought this into the workplace or at the college

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That’s right, routed into your homeowners association.

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Yes, right. That’s right. And, and, and the answer that I kept hearing over and over again is, we’ll just ask and try to create a space. And so it can be as simple as

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You know, would it be okay if we, you know, use this conference room maybe before the start of the work day

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Or you know whether that happens to be like a guided meditation session or if it’s yoga or something else like that. Just ask. Ask your employer.

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If you know because, again, a lot of these resources are not used the whole the whole day anyway. That’s right. And so, companies are starting to allow for that.

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And and they’re seeing productivity increases in their business. So, you know, if you’re like maybe the auditor. Maybe you talk to your boss. If you’re the chief audit executive

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Well, hey, maybe you just ask your team. Would you guys be interested in this. And if the answer is yes, then provide a space for them and just see where it goes.

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That’s right and and I hold in the summers I in to sign. It’s going to be 105 degrees today.

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And that’s that’s Fahrenheit, just see, you know, and it’s it’s it’s a desert environment, it’s very hot, but

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It during the summers. I do hold a class in a conference room, and it’s it. Absolutely. You have to move some of the furniture around but it works just fine. So you don’t need any special yoga studio. It could be a conference room. So that is a perfect example but asking is the first step.

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It’s first step. And again, like you said, Give it, give it some time because again you know the first time that we do anything we feel a little goofy and we don’t really know what we’re doing.

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So. Give it, give it some time, give it three to six months. If it’s not your thing. Pick something else. But ultimately, you know, like we started the show off with internal audit is a stressful job.

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You gotta figure out ways

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To be able to be present to be aware and to try to reduce your stress because it does carry over into the home life. Whether you realize it or not.

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I agree. Absolutely. Well said. Yeah.

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Yeah, so Kurt. Thank you for coming on today. I really appreciate it. And you know, I got to figure out how I’m going to start incorporating yoga into my day as well so

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Fantastic. Okay. Well, thank you for having me on, Jason. I really appreciate that. And I want to encourage all my fellow internal auditors out there to check out yoga.

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Yeah. Well, thank you, and I’m sure we might have to have you come back on later because will will i’m sure everybody’s gonna pay like they were at the conference. And I’m like, holy crap. Give me more. Give me more and more. So it’s like okay, and we’ll have to have Kurt back

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I’d love to be back. So thanks, Jason. I appreciate it. Thanks for your, for your time today. Enjoyed it.

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Alright, thanks.

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Bye bye.

There are various roles internal audit can play in major system implementations and one of the most common is post-implementation reviews. Some things can’t be changed, or are very expensive to fix, after a go-live. Instead of coming in and bayoneting the wounded at the end of the project, there are several other approaches we can take that actually provide much more value to the organization.

Tom Harris, the Vice-President of Internal Audit for National CineMedia joins me to provide a case study on how he took an approach of embedding members of his internal audit team into the project team, and even helped drive the user-setup portion of the project. We explore the risks and benefits of taking different approaches. While embedding internal audit into the project team may limit objectivity and assurance projects for a time, it just may be one of the best way to provide long-term value to the organization and deepen relationships with management.

Transcript

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Welcome everybody to another episode of jamming with Jason. Hey. Today I am excited because I have Tom Harris with me.

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And just a little background on, Tom. He is the Vice President of internal audit at National Center media.

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So he’s a chief audit executive there and we we’ve known each other for a few months now started talking about actually system implementations so wanted to have Tom on

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So that we can kind of talk about how internal audit can kind of interact in a major system implementation.

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Because there’s a couple of different options that people have and so will kind of share what worked really well for Tom just recently.

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Kind of the other approach as well and just kind of go through, talk, talk about share some war stories and some other things like that so that those of you that are going through this can kind of see what some of the different options are that are out there. So, Tom, welcome aboard.

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Well, good morning. How are you, Jason. I’m doing well.

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Now just, just a little bit of trivia. And just to kind of put put some spotlight on people, you know, a lot of people maybe haven’t heard of national center media.

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You know, I didn’t. I hadn’t actually heard of it before I before I met you, but it’s like it’s kind of like companies that I used to work for where everybody uses or sees the product, but they just don’t realize the company. So do you want to just kind of tell everybody just

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Quickly kind of what

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What your company does, because they’re all going to go, oh, yeah, okay. I know what you guys do.

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All right. Well, certainly. And, and I wasn’t aware of national center media until I started looking into the organization. And it’s a great company. It really is.

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Our motto is, we connect brands to movie audiences. We have two primary markets. One is the cinema market and and when you go to the movies and you show up early. There’s a pre show the Nuvi pre show is NCS

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Product and we reach 750 million moviegoers a year. We’re in 21,000 screens. The top 160 DMA doesn’t mean a market areas.

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So we’ve got a lot of different advertising opportunities within the different theaters throughout the US.

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The other market is the digital market and and the tagline, there is going beyond the big screen and we we

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Are in the digital space we’re kind of young we’re small we’re growing. There’s a lot of competitors out there right now the big names are Google and even Amazon is is an advertising as well as Facebook driving

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Digital ads to individual unit users. We’ve got for owned and operated digital properties newly calm, it’s, it’s kind of like Fandango

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It’s your go to digital destination for trailers and showtimes and we also have shuffle. It’s a mobile movie at trivia game.

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Movie arcade, which is a really cool augmented reality app, and then fantasy movie league as popular as the other fantasy leagues are we figured we should have one movie. That’s pretty cool. Yeah.

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And our digital market is a collector and user of consumer data. And I think we are all aware that that regulatory landscape is changing quite a bit.

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Well, in the whole enter the

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Whole entertainment space.

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Is changing significantly, too.

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So I mean it’s I think it’s, it’s always interesting to kind of hear what what companies are doing. And then you know how some of this stuff kind of kind of fits in here. I know, I know, you know, mainly our topic today is kind of talking about system implementations, but

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I think it’s important for people to realize to you.

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Know it’s like everything is changing out there, right.

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I mean system implementations are one thing that changes.

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But there’s lots of stuff you know some of those names that you listed up there, you know, Amazon, Facebook, Google,

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You know, they’re starting to actually develop entertainment content to I mean they’re not just doing ads.

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But they’re like moving heavy into the

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Content space. So going to be a real shake up entertainment, but I know that that’s not what we’re here to talk about today, but I kind of

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So thanks for indulging me on that.

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Now,

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You know, maybe to kind of kind of start with, you know, just kind of give a we can give a little, a little background, maybe on

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It because to me it seems like. And I don’t know if this is the way you see it but but internal audit usually kind of takes one of two approaches when it comes to system implementations

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And so here we’re usually talking about like a big system implementation enterprise resource planning the RP kind of tool so you

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Know, something that goes

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You know, way out into the organization.

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Effects lots of users and I’ve usually seen either kind of this standoffish let’s watch what happens. And then go in and audited afterwards and tell them what they did wrong.

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Or there’s the let’s jump in and kind of embed ourselves in with the team and help work through the process as well. Those are kind of the two that I’ve seen. Have you seen any other ones. Besides that, or

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Yeah, actually I throughout my career, I think I’ve participated in in about a half a dozen different types and some of them are limited scope. Some of them are full scope. I think the two that you mentioned would be the two full scope the post implementation review and that’s that’s

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That’s essentially when auditors go in after the battlefield and speed wounded.

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We’re here to help. And now we’re back. Yeah, that’s right. The two biggest lies in business, right now we’re from internal audit. We’re here to help. And we’re so glad you’re here. Right.

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But, but there’s some other ones to consider as well. And these are more limited one would be a methodology assessment and that’s where you kind of focus on the process, not a particular project. You look at

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Compliance the methodology effectiveness of the methodology and you can do this pre during or post implementation.

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Another would be a Project Risk Assessment where you you break that particular project down into the types of risks, it’s it’s facing how the business is addressing and mitigating those risks.

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And the trouble without one, however, is audit typically isn’t involved and follow through with the risk mediation.

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Risk mediation until after post go live. So you have some issues where you’ve identified risks and then you come back later to see how they were mitigated. But even then it’s too late.

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Yeah, another another limited scope is kind of a pre launch readiness assessment. So the developments done you at is done and then you sit down and say, okay, do we check all the boxes.

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And that is less effective because oftentimes if there needs additional development work or more focus on user access or security you kind of have to halt the project and then go back and redo some things you really don’t get an opportunity to fix them ahead of time.

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And then another one that I think you kind of touched on a little bit would be the key phases review and at different checkpoints or milestones, you take a look at where things are at. It’s a little more involved. But again, it is kind of standoffish. If you get to a

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checkpoint and you realize something isn’t done right, it’s like, Okay, stop. Let’s go back and redo it. So, those, those are I think all very useful.

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The post implementation review, I think, is probably the most, the one that I’ve seen most of my career and its biggest drawback is you don’t you don’t apply those lessons learned. Until next time, which with an AARP could be a 10 years later. Well, no, and 10s of millions of dollars to

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You know, yeah.

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Absolutely. I think that’s

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That’s where

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It kind of, you know, becomes interesting that way. So I thought what I do for some of the US or listeners that aren’t really familiar with the system development lifecycle.

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You know that’s that’s kind of a process that IT departments kind of go through, right. So if you took the CPA exam, you know, because I’ve taught. Lots of people, you know, to help them pass the CPA exam.

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This is one of the big concepts. It’s in there. So some of you may be familiar with this already, but if not, I’ll just kind of run

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Run through kind of the steps really quick because I think this goes back to

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You know what you were talking about Tom on you know what kind of a scope, are we going to do is it’s going to be a full scope is it going to be partial. Is it going to be, you know, whatever. So

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Kind of just start with there’s like this system planning right where people realize hey you know what

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We need a different tool, but we’ve got is not working for us. And so we have to start planning and thinking about what it is that we need

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Then you start kind of analyzing or assessing what systems are out there. And then you can decide, am I going to buy something.

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You know, which would be like a system selection or am I actually going to develop something myself so I’m going to build something myself. And so if you build it, then there’s this whole programming concept that comes into it.

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If you buy it, then you’ve got to configure it. Right. And so again, in any of those steps so far. You can see where audit could be involved or not involved, right, you get to the end of it you do the testing.

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You know your test to make sure it’s doing what it’s supposed to do. And then there’s this whole conversion and implementation phase that you go through where it gets rolled out into the company.

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And then, you know, as you go through, you’re going to be, you know, looking at refinement and how the operations are working and other things like that until you need to go back to the system planning phase again. Right.

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And so I think you know like you talked about some of these different ways that we can

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Do it. We kind of plug ourselves in two different phases of this s DLC process.

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And so maybe let’s let’s talk first about this post implementation review because I think, like you said, this is the one that I’ve seen auditors do the most. And it seems kind of like traditional audit work. We go in afterwards. And we are back and letting people sometimes

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Because they didn’t get everything right and then we’re critical of

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Them at the end. And I don’t think that’s the most effective way of doing it right.

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And so again, I mean, I don’t know what your experience has been on that. If you want to maybe share as

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A story or if you have a story about that. I know I do.

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On on what can go wrong when we just kind of jump.

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In at the end.

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Yeah, absolutely. And, and I’ve seen system implementation reviews, where

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Audit has come in to look at how user access was set up how user security was set up, which is a critical piece of earpiece.

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And oftentimes, not frequently, but oftentimes that go live will be the user access is set up so that everyone has administrative

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Privileges and the thinking is that they don’t want security to get in the way of the functionality until they fully vetted

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The functionality of course in a you at environment, you can do that, but in a live environment where you’ve got real data that poses a huge risk to an organization.

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And you don’t know about that. You’re not involved about that it with that as an audit until you’ve already gone live and you recognize that for a six week period.

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Everybody had full rights to do whatever they want, you know, all of the high and critical

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Segregation of duty issues are unmitigated all of those risks are just fully exposed to me. I’ve seen this a couple of times in my career and it’s always around when audit plans, a post implementation review.

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If you’re involved during the entire project, you can put the brakes on and say, no, we’re not going to do that. We just can’t do that and then work with the business to set those security roles up

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So that in you at not a problem in go live when when you’ve got related. You’ve got to have big problem they so I think that’s probably the most significant risk that I’ve seen with Post Implementation reviews is in not being involved up to go live. Yeah.

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Well, and you see it. You see this all the

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Time and because I actually what you just described, kind of goes into my story. So I think it

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Maybe one point to kind of make to because as you were talking right you said, especially like in UAE people think, hey,

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We don’t want security to slow us down. So let’s just, you know, leave it open. Let’s go through, let’s do what we need to do. And we’ll worry about security later and and there

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Because there’s always like this tension between

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The IT group who is trying to satisfy the customer, they want they want the system to be able to, you know, not slow down the user. And then there’s this other group, usually called information security.

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Right. That does want to or needs to, you know, deal with the user security issues and other stuff like that.

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And when those two are separated. You know, usually it becomes kind of a check and balance if information security is just kind of a part of it, then usually it’s left until the last minute. And that was my story. Okay.

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I came in. I came into an organization to set up an internal audit department.

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There had been what they call them internal auditor there before me. But, you know, it really wasn’t internal audit. I honestly couldn’t figure out what she did most of the time.

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Afterwards, and when she left. I came in and was starting a department and exactly what you described of security and, you know, kind of

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Getting left until the end is exactly what happened. So I came in right after the system implementation and honestly it. So, this the it was scheduled to go live on a Monday.

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And on Friday, the story that I heard because I wasn’t there yet, but the the team had gotten together. And on Friday BEFORE THE MONDAY. GO LIVE said, oh, there’s this whole security.

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component that we didn’t really address before, what should we do about that.

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And so

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You know, it’s like

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You shouldn’t get that far, and not realize right

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So, so one person like

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took home the book, I guess, right, and read over the weekend as well. I think we need to flip the switch to this and it was, it was kind of that all open

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Sort of thing.

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And so you fast forward, you know, six months or a

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Year. When I come in. Well, I also get information security is one of my responsibilities very quickly after this little cluster that happened.

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And found out that that decision that they made made my life in our group tremendously difficult because now we had to like completely customize every user role.

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And shut everything down and make sure that we’ve shot all of the right things down instead of like a shot and then open it.

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Kind of a thing. So I think that point that you bring up, you know, if we just wait until the post implementation review.

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Sometimes things have happened that we really can’t fix. At that point, you know, like you said, it’s like, well, shoot, I guess we got to do it next time. But that might be five years from now.

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So yep and and the things that can’t be fixed are really difficult to get around for instance data conversion accuracy.

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The completeness and accuracy controls over ensuring that the data in the old system is converted into the new system.

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It once you do that if you don’t have those controls set up kind of got to go through a UA T before you go through a go live to validate the process of the conversion

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If that isn’t done up front and and if the business isn’t ready and aware that they need to essentially evidence that the business verified completeness and accuracy over that data, you can undo it once once once you’ve converted. It’s done.

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And that was another thing that the business was very receptive with, you know,

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And I was very fortunate here at NCR because the development team was really focused on doing things right and the business was really focused on doing things right.

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And, you know, the point is that once you get past go live. There’s stuff. You just can’t go back and fix and the stuff that you can is very expensive and takes a lot more time.

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Yeah, so you know and like I said, I think that, historically, I think most auditors are doing this post implementation review but but you did, you know, I think the word you use before it was kind of embedded you embedded yourself into

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The team itself right so

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You were kind of

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Involved all along the way, which

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Which I think is a good thing. Now, a lot of audit purists would say, well, now when you do that, right. You’re effectively helping to build the system so you lose your objectivity and now you can audit it

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Okay, so I’m sure you know those thoughts must have been going through your head too. Right. I mean, how would you respond to somebody that says that

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Well, it’s certainly a risk of this approach, and it’s something that that you need to be candid about with your audit committee and with your CFO and with the project sponsors and

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In this particular instance, I absolutely did lose my objectivity over user access and setting up security.

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That the business. The project had gotten to a point where the business needed some to make some decisions on what the risk ratings were for the sod conflicts and how to mitigate those

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What kind of user roles could be set up how things could be configured. They needed somebody to come in and just really sit with them and work through it.

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So I did that, recognizing that you know at this point, I can’t perform an independent audit over user access for a year, year and a half.

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That the approach then became finding a partner, a third party partner who could independently come in and conduct an audit and there’s lots of there’s there’s lots of firms out there that are capable of doing this.

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But you know he required the support from the CFO, because it was budget that we hadn’t planned for required

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Knowledge by the audit committee to say okay this is what happened. We, we knew this was a risk and this is how we’re going to mitigate it and

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And I think having all of those pieces connected was critical to being able to step in, you know, it was an anticipation of what happens if

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To be able to step in to keep the project going to set the user access up correctly for other parts of the project.

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I was able to maintain my independence more of a consultative basis. Well, you know, when you set up workflows. This is what it should look like.

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And that, but not actually do the work, but help and assist what those workflows should look like. And that’s really, you know, looking at controls and assessing the controls that they’re putting into place before they put them into place.

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In, in that respect, I was able to maintain independence and we’re very confident going forward for the next year so that we can conduct these audits and do them in a way that maintains our objectivity.

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So absolutely. It’s, it’s probably one of the biggest risks. Another huge risk taking this approach is it takes a little big time commitment. There’s a lot of meetings that you have to attend.

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And of course the corollary is if you’re spending your time on this, what other things aren’t being done that might be emerging risks that audit still has to respond to. Yeah, well,

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So those are two things that you do have to

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Think about as you’re going into it. Right. I mean, if you’re the chief audit executive and and you’re looking at the amount of work that you can do.

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This next year, you have to make some of those decisions right is is this important enough and it’s a strategic initiative for the organization, we’re going to be spending 10s of millions of dollars on this.

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And like I said, if we don’t get it right, there’s some things that can’t be fixed, you know, should we be spending our time they’re realizing again if we get

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Deep into it. We might have an objectivity or independence issue and may not be able to audit that

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But, you know, in my opinion, I think it’s better for us to participate.

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On the team and provide value that way instead of the value of the audit afterwards because like you said, you can always hire somebody to come in.

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And do that afterwards. I think it, it just provides more value. And one thing that I hope everybody listening gets is the audit report is not the only value.

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That we provide to our organizations, right.

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So, okay.

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To choose to be on the team and actually help throughout. In fact I would argue in something like this with the system implementation, you add more value by being a part of the team then coming in afterwards.

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So,

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So, so maybe let’s

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Because I know this actually really went successful for you. And so I wanted to kind of

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break it apart a little bit for others that are kind of, you know, maybe about to embark on

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This kind of a journey and have to

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decide, you know what they’re what they’re going to do.

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Because again, I’m guessing. This was probably kind of a new approach in your organization where you were more on the team. So maybe what were some of the things that you needed to do.

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To be able to get the

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Support and and to, you know, really, kind of, you know, persuade or influence people that this really was the best use of your time.

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Yeah, absolutely. And it is a different approach when and I’ve been with SEM for about a year now and when I interviewed for the role.

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My audit committee chair in the interview process mentioned that the prior GL implementation 810 years ago didn’t go very well and it couldn’t happen again.

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DING

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Ding, ding, ding, a big red flags. Right.

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Yeah and you know to me that told me a couple things. One is I would find it highly unusual that the audit committee chair would would still have that in front of his mind after so many years.

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You know they’re they’re at a governance level where yeah we knew we had a new GL system and we knew across this much, but that’s about it. Right. He was able to articulate specific issues with the implementation.

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That he wanted. He wanted it done differently this time. And when I met with the CFO, as well as, you know, she mentioned that the same thing. She wasn’t here with the company at the time.

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But she did note that the prior GL implementation had quite a few issues with it and it took some time for the organization to recover from that. And this, you know, this time and needed to be different. It’s like, okay, it’ll be different. Yeah.

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And I’m a big believer that internal audit should only go where they’re invited and I know that is a bit controversial.

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Because if if somebody is doing nefarious things, then naturally you wouldn’t invite audit into take a look at it. But on the other side of the coin.

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I think the CFO and the audit committee chair will invite you wherever you need to go right. So I think by invitation only for this type of a project is is critical. And it’s not just well

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Audit Committee said, I’m going to go there. Somebody’s gonna do it. It’s also talking with the project sponsors. How would you like me to approach this.

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What kinds of concerns do you have, what kinds of things can audit do to address those concerns.

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And taking that very service approach that that mentality that we are here to provide a service. We’re here to help the business to make it better, that’s ultimately what audits goal is

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And just that attitude in talking with the project sponsors initially and finding out what they’re worried about much like we do the risk assessments every year and then figuring out

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creative and collaborative ways that we can address those things and and by having those conversations pretty early on, it became obvious that the the team, the development team, the stakeholders.

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They were, they were very much wanting audit to get involved and even to the point where it’s it was, you know, we were looking at a vendor right now.

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A couple of vendors, we’ve gone through this RFP process. This is where we’re at. We’re not convinced we have the right

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The right resources to help with this development effort. What do you think we should do those kinds of conversations early on in the project and then being able to deliver some some answers to some difficult questions.

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Since audit has this independent set of eyes and we’ve got completely different business experiences throughout our career oftentimes we think an obvious answer is right there that for some reason.

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The business and the people on the team. They just don’t see it. So being able to articulate those things and talk through those things in a very consultative advisory capacity.

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really sets the tone for how you’re going to operate with the organization as a whole. And I think those are really key in getting the approval, if you will, the invitation.

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To be invited in. And that’s something that that speaks as much about the organization and and the people that you’re working with.

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As it does about governance in the audit department itself. So, those, those things really setting that tone, letting people know that you actually are there to help you not just going to stand back and criticize it afterwards.

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Well, I think, I think.

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You know what

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What you brought up there kind of refers back to I know a lot of times we use the word insight that we provide insight. Right. But that’s, that’s exactly what you’re describing, there is

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You know when when you’re in the day to day activities, you know, you’re the you’re the the project sponsor or somebody else on the team.

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It’s, it’s often easy to miss something that’s right in front of your face because we’re so worried about whatever else we’re doing

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And so that outside perspective from audit really can provide that inside when you just bring up some of those things. Right. And that’s, that’s, I think, where we where we can end up adding a lot of value.

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In our organizations. Now, I thought it was interesting because I was going to ask you a follow up question. You know, it’s like, obviously, you had support from the audit committee and the CFO. But how did you get the support from the project sponsors and the team.

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But it, but it sounds like when

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You when you went to talk to

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Them, you know, and kind of say, Hey, you know, we know this thing is coming up. What are you worried about instead of going to them and saying, Hey, the audit committee wants me to audit you or check out and make sure everything is right.

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You kind of went in with the

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Hey, what are you worried about. And as a natural part

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Of that conversation. They’re like, dude, we totally want you to come help us right

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Is that kind of the sense that came out of this right

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Yeah. Absolutely. And I think that that talking through what they wanted from the project and what what’s not working for them now and what is working for them now and just getting an understanding of that.

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Really the natural conclusion was can you know, can you come in and help us with these things.

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And it was vendor selection hadn’t been made yet, but the project design the product requirements had been identified and there were

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A list of seven things seven enhancements that are controller wanted and they were. I mean their basic control stuff that we, the organization should have had, you know, years ago workflow has been around for what a couple of decades and

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We’re just now getting to implement it, so talking through those things and our controller and get to the point where she was willing to give up some of those benefits. Some of those improvements and enhancements.

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Just to get the project done because of costs and budget and it’s like, well hey before you go that way. Let’s see what we can do about finding the right vendor about driving a better budget that our CFO approved.

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And working through that process with all of the different stakeholders, I think, was really beneficial. I would call that one of the very early wins.

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And it demonstrated that that yeah audit can bring things to the table that they that they hadn’t thought possible yet.

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Not because we’re so great. But just because we have a different perspective. And we have different experiences throughout our career that we, that we can say, hey, wait. I’ve seen this before. Let’s try it this way.

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So I think the early wins and the kinds of conversations that we had was just really critical to forming a project team and forming

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Trust with with the group so that we could we could you know two months later when we’re duking out what a workflow should look like. We still have those common elements that we built trust on

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Well, and I think

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I think that approach that you took that this is a big lesson learning for people, you know, is, is there’s two, there’s two ways you could have gone in and talk to the project sponsors right and i and i think

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A lot of times people have the

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Tendency to do this. This first approach, which would be, Hey, you know you’re on our audit plan. This next year because the audit committee and the CFO are concerned that we can’t have a mistake like happened last time, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. So you’re going to be audited.

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And I think that’s kind of the knee jerk reaction of a lot of

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People is, you know, oh well you know they want me to do this. So I’m going to, we’re going to come on it right and you come in with kind of that.

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That attitude which is very off putting to other people right versus what you did, which is coming in and saying hey you know you, we got this new project coming up here, what

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What are you, what are you worried about, you know, and just start to have that conversation because as people start bringing that stuff up right some some magic words that people can use is

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Once somebody kind of expresses what they’re worried about or what they need, then you could turn around and say, Well, would you like some help with that.

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And if they say

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Yes, it’s like

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Now you’re being invited right

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And so you’re not

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There like forcing them to do it and and especially like that first attitude you know of coming in. We’re going to audit.

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A lot of the, you know, some of those people on the team might have been there for that previous GL implementation. So if you go in kind of bad mouthing the old thing or the stuff that’s not working. Currently, they’re probably going to take offense at it anyway.

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Yep begin with and that’s going to damage your relationships.

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So great job on that. See, that’s why I wanted to talk to you today. You did all these things.

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Are great and I want everybody else to hear this too.

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So,

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So, so you get in your you’re on the team. So maybe kind of

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Talk about, you know, because like you said this is a it is a big time commitment you know for you and for certain members of your team.

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Because in doing this, you’re obviously not doing some other things but but kind of maybe explain some of the ways that you were involved in the team and kind of through the process. You know, because I’m sure there were other people on your staff probably that maybe we’re

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We’re helping out with this too, and

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So,

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Some of the different roles that you played in that and how how that kind of unfolded as as you went through.

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Sure, absolutely. And it I think attending the the weekly stand ups, we use an agile methodology we do use s DLC that that kind of waterfall approach where it’s linear and sequential so you got to finish one phase before you move on to the next.

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And in the development phase here, we, we, we, the agile methodology would have weekly stand up meetings where we come in. Talk about blockers work through issues.

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And the idea is to continue to work on things right to keep it on pace and we would have sprints off to the side, which is another agile methodology to get certain things done.

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And the, the stand up meetings, I think we’re probably the most important. A lot of the breakout sessions where we would sit down with the dictator stakeholders and developers and and work through individual functionality.

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And again, independence is key attending the meetings, providing that that consulting, they had asked questions about how is this structured and I could ask questions back. Well, if you do it this way.

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What about that and and if you take this approach, what’s the impact over here. And a lot of those questions lead to dialogues that that were really productive in terms of how the product was going to be configured.

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Particularly when it came to the custom code within revenue and deferred revenue our model has some very peculiar things when it comes to revenue recognition, the timing of when we deliver

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The, the expectation within the market about the flexibility of delivery time different costs CPM costs.

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Different market areas get changed and all of that can have an effect on revenue recognition. So our

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Revenue module required quite a bit of customization and working through that, not wanting to replicate what was done before, wanting to make it better. I think was was the focus of what those breakout sessions were and

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A couple of key points I talked a little bit about where I rolled up my sleeves when it came to user access and and the security roles.

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There were some other points with data conversion that the testing of the completeness and accuracy of the data coming from the old system to the new system.

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Providing a three lines of defense so that when Deloitte our external auditor came in, we were able to deliver a package that says here’s how we addressed the data conversion and you know they spent a few hours looking at it and said this is fantastic.

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Which which I think was reflects on the team because they were willing to go through and put in the due diligence to make sure that that the testing and the validation of that conversion

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Met expectations, not just complete and accurate, but also being able to evidence it in a way that our external auditor felt really good about having accurate data. So I did. I did have a senior it auditor.

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very experienced gentlemen who who’s very strong all the way around. He did the we call it a validation of the assessment of the conversion, which

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Kind of gives you an idea of what that picture looks like he did it at you at which was a full validation for all of the data conversion and then we did it again at go live.

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In both of those instances we developed a methodology for presenting what was done. And then we also issued a memo.

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Copying our external as well as the audit committee and the CFO, saying, you know, here’s, here’s what they here’s the business did. Here’s how we validated it

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We connected with our external pretty early on to make sure our approach was good. And so, those, those are two memos, we issued

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There weren’t a lot of formal communications, you know, typically you’ll have a status meeting or an update memo or no report at the end and a planning memo at the beginning.

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Because of the way this project evolved. There was very little bit of that form communication. There was a lot of informal day to day discussions with

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With the stakeholders, with the team meetings with the audit committee on a quarterly basis.

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Occasionally a separate call to the audit committee chair just to, you know, let them know what we’re doing. And this is one of the things that I’m I don’t know how well I did this part.

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Because I would have liked to have seen more frequent formal communication command of it.

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And it just didn’t develop it was there was a lot of moving targets and in my mind, I’m thinking how could I have done that better. I’m just not sure yet.

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Well, we’ve got this independent audit of user access and security coming up.

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We’ll have a formal report out of that. But as I look back over the last nine months and I look at the amount of time that I put into it.

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That that my my senior internal auditor put into it and the end just the lack of formal communication. I’m kind of bothered by that nobody else seems to me, but I’m looking at it going, How could. How could I have done that better. And I’m and I’m not sure.

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Well, and actually, because it’s funny, as you were saying that because I was going to ask you, kind of a

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Follow up coaching question, if you will, from that but

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You almost kind of answered your own

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Question. Okay.

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But, but I think it’s, it’s an important point to bring up and I’m glad that you did because I’m sure that a lot of people listening.

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Would be or could be feeling the same way. Right. It’s like, I mean, in order, we get used to, you know, we go into

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We go and do a project and there’s, you know, pre communications and during communications and afterwards we issue this final report, we’ve got this PowerPoint deck and we’ve got blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right.

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And we get used to the more formal

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Communication.

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And sometimes we spend way too much time on those two

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By the way, but that’s

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That’s another point for another day.

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But, you know, especially because as you were talking to me. You guys are taking an agile approach to the project and formal communications under an agile approach.

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Don’t really exist. That’s what your stand up meetings are that’s some of your, you know, other stuff that’s kind of built into it.

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But throughout the process. You obviously were communicating what you were doing because like you said you were a little bit bothered by it, but nobody else seemed to be bothered by it. So to me, that means

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Well, if nobody else in your organization was bothered by it, including the audit committee your executive

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You belong. The team.

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If they didn’t feel the need for you to put out a

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Formal report, I think, good on you, mate. It’s okay.

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We’re still communicating right so

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So it’s okay.

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So comfortable with that.

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Okay, I’ll think about, think about

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I think that’s

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Like you said, I probably should talk more about that on some other stuff, but it’s it’s it has, as we move from kind of, you know, traditional auditing kind of what we’ve done to more

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You know quicker speed. I mean, some people using the term agile auditing and trying to incorporate those processes into it. I think it’s, it is going to make some of us feel a little uncomfortable like

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I did all this work, but what do I have to show for it.

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Right. It’s like, yeah.

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I mean, I grew up working with my hands. My dad was a

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Contractor I built furniture and did all kinds of stuff, you know, at the end of the day when you’re using your hands to make something

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You can see the progress at the end of the day, and you can feel good about it. You know, or it’s like my dad would drive me around. He’s like, yep, I built that house over there in 1974 right or whatever kind of thing.

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In our job.

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We don’t get some of that same satisfaction because there’s no, like, tangible end product.

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And so sometimes it can feel a little awkward like that, but like, I’m telling you, we probably need to get, get comfortable with it because

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If your audit committee didn’t have a problem with it if your executive didn’t have a problem with it. And if your, you know, project team didn’t have a problem with it. I think you guys still did a pretty good job of communicating

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That fair enough.

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And I know you said you got to noodle on it a little bit, but

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I think that’s probably a reality that we’re moving into as a profession. We’re gonna have we’re gonna have to learn how to get comfortable and find other ways maybe to check in to make sure that we’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing. But if everybody’s happy we probably are so

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Okay, anyway. Sorry.

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I’ll get off my soapbox now.

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But, uh,

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Yeah so. So that was actually kind of like a lesson learned, I guess, too, because I wanted to kind of wrap up our talk you know today. I mean, obviously you guys you did some great things, people were happy. It sounds like the project was a success, you know,

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Besides this one that we just talked about, you know, around formal communication and should you have done something better around formal communication.

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I guess, or there’s some other things that you learned, kind of going through this or maybe things that were aha moments for you as you as you were going through

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Yeah, there’s, there’s a handful of things we we got a little creative in you it and and let me, let me just say that I do think that it was a success. I, you know, a B plus A minus, which for

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project of this size is pretty good. We did have one three week slip in schedule and three weeks on a nine month project is is nothing good.

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That’s nothing. Yes, we came in at budget little under I think just a hair under overall budget, which is pretty phenomenal.

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And we’re getting the functionality that we wanted. So I think, I think overall, it was, it was a success, we had, we did have to get creative to meet that

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To meet some of those objectives within you at we actually set up a separate two different utilities, which

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ended up creating some issues for us after go live that we didn’t see and we did this because we hadn’t gotten a clean data conversion yet. So we wanted to be able to

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Have a UT you at environment where we could do just data validation and of course if you have a UA T environment for functionality, changing the data. So, so we had two different UHT set up at one point in time going concurrently.

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In the custom code for our revenue and deferred revenue was being tested. And we’re flushing out quite a few functional issues in that one environment.

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And then we did our validation data validation. We have a couple of different times where we had to re initiate the data conversion

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And make changes and how we configure it, and some of the sequencing and we finally got to the point where we got a clean conversion

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And then we pull those to you at environments together, but we didn’t really test some of the functionality in that combined environment.

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We thought it was good. Right. Okay. Yeah. After, after go live. We started seeing some snuggly ISSUES. AND THEN THE SNUGGLY issues were with invoicing and it was all about.

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Printing right it’s like the you could go in and check the invoice data and it was clean. But when it came out as an invoice that would go to our customer. It wasn’t

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Or they would just disappear. Right, we just didn’t have any invoices, it’s, you know, the data is there.

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So that. So the core logic is there, but what we do with the data to get the invoice out something was going wrong, something was up. We couldn’t figure it out.

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And the, the, the sneakily issues started to raise and they’re things that would would slow us down in our clothes process.

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Nothing major or monumental but but they just started to, you know, essentially, we had to throw some more resources at it to start cleaning them up and getting on top of it because we weren’t closing them out as quickly as we were accumulating them.

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So, so, so I think the duel you at may have contributed to those things. I think our testing scripts within you. It could have been better but they weren’t bad and and I think those are some tweaks, we, we would do next time. Right.

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And we also had to make some some decisions about functionality that we were going to push post go live full AP workflow is something that we had to push post go live because Microsoft had an issue that wouldn’t be fixed until the later revision.

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We also pushed moderate risk side conflicts to after go live.

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Addressing all high and and and knowing what the moderate ones were we just weren’t going to fix them until later, you know, we took a look at him and said, Yeah, we can live with this for a week or two. And then we also had

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Some, some and I’m trying to think. There’s another functionality that we had to push doesn’t come to mind right now.

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And another thing that we had to prepare for was a mandatory update from Microsoft. Two months after go live to go from 8.4 to 10 point four.

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So those were things that were we had to prepare for if we’d have pushed the go live.

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Point for later. You know, another period or two later, we would have to start things over because only the new version would have been available for us to go live so that that I think really drove us to look at you at a little bit differently with the two different environments.

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So I think those are those are all lessons learned, maybe one or two of those are pitfalls. But ultimately, these were decisions that were that were made.

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And I think the decision making process was very effective because we talked about risks we talked about how to mitigate it. We talked about, you know, do we really want to do this. Do we want to take these other approaches.

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We didn’t know everything at the time, but the discussions and the conversations around those decisions were were really centered on what’s the risk. What’s our mitigation and and why do we really want to do it. I think there were very effective conversations

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Well, and that’s and that’s the important thing for people to remember. Anytime we’re

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We’re, we’re dealing with risks we don’t have all the information when you have to make a decision. So

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You have the good conversations

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Right, and then you make the best decision. You can, in hindsight, you know,

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Okay, next time you might do something different. But, I mean, it sounds like again.

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A minus or b plus effort that’s that’s still pretty good. That’s still a little

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Better. Yeah.

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00:47:39.720 –> 00:47:43.050
We’re pretty pleased. Yeah, yeah. Now one of the things, actually, that I that

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Because when we were talking beforehand to probably to bring up to, because this kind of gets back to

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Cloud computing and the fact that, you know, a lot of people are moving into this space and in one of the things around software is updates and patches and things like that. Right.

348
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And school

349
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Historically, you know, each organization has kind of decided, well, do

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I want to do the patch or the update. Do I want to wait, you know, three months. Do I want to wait until the next version, you know that comes out.

351
00:48:16.530 –> 00:48:23.880
And and when you were in a you know client server environment, you could make those decisions because everything was running off of your own servers.

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In fact that was sometimes why you made those

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Decisions. Right. It’s like our servers can’t

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handle that.

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00:48:29.970 –> 00:48:31.290
Update or whatever we got

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To fix some hardware things first. Okay. In the cloud environment, you don’t have that choice to you.

357
00:48:39.270 –> 00:48:50.250
Know, not really. And we were Microsoft does updates on a monthly basis. And initially, we thought that we were required to take every single update

358
00:48:50.670 –> 00:49:07.350
And they’ve kind of soften that a little bit so that there are certain updates we can skip and certain that are mandatory they do recommend that you don’t skip two in a row, because the changes will be significant or I should say more significant than if if you did everyone

359
00:49:08.940 –> 00:49:18.510
It does require a bigger focus on the updates. How are you going to test it, particularly when it comes to the custom code.

360
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We haven’t gone through one yet. We’re, we’re right now preparing to go through one and hopefully it’ll address the AP workflow stuff. It’ll, it’ll

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00:49:29.040 –> 00:49:35.610
address some of the other functional things that we’ve seen that that we kind of want to get cleaned up, nothing major.

362
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But the turnaround time on those updates are really quick, you typically have a week from the time you get the code until it’s going to be pushed and

363
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We’re kind of trying to keep an open mind about what that looks like. And we’ve done some things internally where we’ve moved projects out to give our developers or we call them the finance application team.

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To give them more time in their calendar. For instance, the independent art of user access

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We push that out to September to give our developers, an opportunity to look at the code and to kind of free up their, their schedule and again it’s collaborative right say hey we got to do this.

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What’s your calendar look like, you know, the response was, Well, we can fit it in if we have to, like, Well, you know, what does that mean

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00:50:25.830 –> 00:50:32.970
Well here’s all this. Here’s all the stuff we’re working on that week. Oh, okay. How about if we move it out a month. Oh, that’d be great.

368
00:50:33.420 –> 00:50:43.920
So it’s, it’s part of the of that collaborative approach. So I think that’s really key with all of these changes and particularly with the cloud, just being aware

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Of what’s being pushed and the very tight turnaround cycle that the team has to do the testing to check for functionality and then prepare for that update

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00:50:54.150 –> 00:50:58.380
Yeah, well, because it does obviously change some of the processes that you have to do both.

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Both your team as well as it, you know, to be able to prepare for these if they’re coming out, monthly, you know, where

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00:51:06.030 –> 00:51:22.170
You know, again, it used to be. Maybe quarterly or six months, you know, is when when the updates used to come out and now, like you said, that they’re coming up much more frequently. So you just have to have to have a better process to be able to help you get through those as well. So

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00:51:22.320 –> 00:51:35.130
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And right now, our department is looking at a consulting project to implement DevOps principles within our different product development life cycles.

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We have core product yeah and and it’s really pretty interesting. There’s s s DLC is very good at being pragmatic and controlled predictable.

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00:51:48.690 –> 00:52:00.960
But it’s not very good when you need speed to market and product evolution is critical. And of course, with our digital products, you know, we need to get the market quick we

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Adapt

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You know, these are all web based and mobile app based things that we’ve got to quickly turn around. So our digital products group has

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Implemented some of these DevOps principles pretty still low to medium maturity. For most of them. But if we can take these ideas and use them within our core business where we have our IT operations and we have all of our center media products.

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Then I think will be more nimble.

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Company and our products will come out quicker.

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00:52:36.120 –> 00:52:48.000
The coral. The corollary to that is using the same kinds of DevOps principles for these cloud pushed upgrades, particularly with with finance and operations module.

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Automated testing.

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Understanding what dependencies are within our custom code. I think those principles are going to be really key to quickly adopting whatever changes get pushed to us.

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Well, I think that’s that is going to be the future things are things are going to continue to happen at a quicker pace.

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And we have to figure out how to be able to do it at a quicker pace, you know, that is one of the challenges I think for our profession in general as business speeds up, we have to figure out ways of speeding up as well. So

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I

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00:53:27.060 –> 00:53:27.750
Completely agree.

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00:53:28.350 –> 00:53:33.180
Good discussion Tom and like normally at night, we get to talk in and holy smokes, the time goes by.

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I know

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00:53:36.060 –> 00:53:37.890
You probably need to get to another meeting.

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00:53:38.550 –> 00:53:47.910
But hey, I really, I really appreciate you coming on and talking about this. I think it’s some really practical stuff that a lot of people are dealing with and

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00:53:48.330 –> 00:53:57.300
You know, hopefully, again, as they listened through here that they get some ideas for you know how they can improve what they’re doing. Maybe take this kind of an approach going forward.

393
00:53:57.840 –> 00:54:13.110
Because, you know, just like you were talking about s DLC is. It’s good. It’s a good process in general, but it’s very rigid, I think, you know, a lot of our traditional audit methodologies like you know going in and doing a post implementation review.

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00:54:14.400 –> 00:54:20.250
Fine, but it probably doesn’t match as much the business environment that we’re in right now.

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00:54:20.730 –> 00:54:26.670
And so we’re going to have to start doing things a little bit differently. And like I said, I really appreciate you coming on and sharing

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00:54:27.120 –> 00:54:40.770
What you’ve done that is a little bit different and kind of the good things that happened. Yeah, there were some learnings. But, you know, overall, like you said this was an A minus p plus kind of effort. So, gotta say, Good on you, mate. You guys did did good on that one.

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00:54:41.790 –> 00:54:45.570
I will, thank you. And it’s been a pleasure to talk about it and I really enjoyed the conversation.

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00:54:45.960 –> 00:54:46.920
Alright, well thanks

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00:54:47.070 –> 00:54:47.640
Thanks again.

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00:54:48.630 –> 00:54:50.160
You bet. Cheers. Cheers.

Ultimately you are the one responsible for your career advancement. Recent surveys show employers are investing less in the training and development on their employees (e.g. 80% of employees state their employer does not offer training, and 86% of workers feel their manager is not skilled in developing employees). Ouch!

The truth is, what got you to where you are now, won’t get you to where you want to be. Achieving your goals and career aspirations will require you obtaining experience, training and certifications different than what you currently have, to move on to the next level. But our personal and professional development is also just not about moving to the next level. You need those thing even in your current role as the world changes and moves forward.

In this episode we discuss results from a recent survey and steps you can take to determine what you need to get where you want to go.

To listen and for complete show notes and links to downloads, visit: http://www.jasonmefford.com/jammingwithjason/

To download and read the survey mentioned in this episode: Pulse of the American Worker: Special Report – The Future of Work, Career Expectations and Skills: http://news.prudential.com/presskits/pulse-american-worker-special-report.htm

To fill out your application for membership in the Chief Audit Executive (CAE) Forum visit: http://bit.ly/cae-forum-join The open enrollment period is only open until Friday, 13 September 2019, so get your application submitted today or you’ll have to wait until the next open enrollment period.

If you are ready to start investing in yourself, check out the technical and soft-skill training options through cRisk Academy, the #1 on-demand and webinar training platform for internal auditors. They offer video courses and certification from one hour to multiple day-formats, and you receive a CPE certificate for each training.

cRisk Academy On-Demand Training: https://ondemand.criskacademy.com/
cRisk Academy Webinars: https://www.bigmarker.com/communities/crisk-academy/conferences
cRisk Academy Website: https://criskacademy.com/

The #1 #internalauditpodcast in the world has interviews and discussions (jam sessions) relevant to Chief Audit Executives and professionals in #internalaudit, risk management, and compliance.

Transcript

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Welcome to another episode of jamming with Jason Hey welcome back everybody. I’m glad to be here with you. And today, one of the things that I’ve been researching recently there was a new survey that came out. It’s called The Future of Work career expectations and skills.

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And so I’ve just been doing some research kind of about the future of work, how that might relate to

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You know professionals and internal audit risk and compliance and so I wanted to go through and share with you some things that I am kind of learning from that.

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And where I kind of see this going in our profession. So today is going to be a little bit more kind of about professional development about thinking about your career.

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And where you want to go because there’s there’s lots of different career paths for you to go in internal audit.

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And in you know it’s it’s really good for you to actually kind of think about this, be proactive see some of the things that are going on.

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So that you can get to where you want to get. So, this episode is titled What got you here won’t get you there. And we’re going to talk about that because that really is true what what it took to get to where you’re currently at

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Is not going to help you get to where you want to be in the future. So you’re going to have to do some things a little bit differently. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

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So before we get started. This episode is actually sponsored by see risk Academy. Now see rescue Academy is the number one on demand and webinar training platform.

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For internal auditors. So they’re specifically targeted pretty much all of their trainings are things that are relevant for internal auditors.

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And like I said, they provide on demand courses. And so what that means is it’s online, you can go out and take the courses.

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When you have time, so you don’t have to necessarily show up at a certain time or place. You don’t have to travel. You could do it even some of the stuff on the way to and from work.

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Because everything is online so that it really is training that you can access anytime, anywhere. And on any device.

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So you can even do it on your phone to and from work if you needed to now. They also offer webinars as well. Those do obviously require a time and date for you to show up.

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But most of their webinars are actually free so make sure and check it out. Like I said, they’ve got online courses and are also developing some certification courses.

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Which means that when you finish the training and take the test, you can actually obtain another certificate

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To be able to help you in your career. So again, check out see risk Academy. You can find them at see risk Academy com and that see the letter C and then risk academy.com and I’ll make sure and link that up in the show notes below.

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Now as I go through the and want to talk. Let me, let me talk a little bit first here about about this survey and then, like I said, well, we’ll kind of tie this back into

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How this relates to professionals in internal audit risk and compliance and what some of the things are that you can start doing now to be able to prepare for the future of work. Okay. Because every so often there are kind of systematic changes that happen in the workforce.

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In the workplace, the type of work that we’re doing and things like that. And if you want to be prepared for those changes. You have to actually start preparing

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Before the changes happen that way you’re going to be prepared when these things happen while everybody else at that point is kind of sprinting and trying to catch up at that particular point.

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So in in this survey, I’ma talk a little bit about kind of both sides of it so so kind of from an employee standpoint.

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So those of you. I mean, everybody’s an employee of some kind, but also I’ll bring up a few things from the managers perspective as well.

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Because this is something if you’re managing people that you also need to be thinking about this, because you’re going to need to start doing some things differently.

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To be able to prepare for the future, if you want to keep people around working for you. So the first thing that I found very, very interesting from this survey.

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And again, I’ll leave, I’ll leave links in the show notes as well. So you can go back and actually download it and read through this yourself. If you’d like to

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But one of the things that was very interesting to me is the employees that took this survey.

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They said that if they were to change jobs only 13% of them would try to find a new job in the same organization where they are at

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So that means that if people leave, they’re probably going to leave your organization 80% 87% of the people. Right. So the flip side of that is 87% of the people.

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When they are looking for a new job, they’re not going to be considering their current company.

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So from a manager perspective again, you need to start thinking about that. Why is it that people would not want to stay in the organization.

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And I’m guessing you know, again, I’m doing some more research about that, but I’m guessing it’s because the employees probably either don’t feel like they’re being treated fairly in the particular job. And so they want to try a different organization, hoping that it will treat them better.

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Or maybe they see themselves as kind of being limited in the company where they are currently at

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Now, one of the reasons why people leave. And again, this is important from the employer standpoint, the number one reason why people

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Want to leave their current job is they want more of a flexible work schedule. And so again, if you’re an employer. That’s not providing that to people.

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About 50% of the people. That’s the reason why they would end up leaving to go to another place. It’s not because of more money. It’s because they want some more flexibility.

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In that in fact about 25% of the people said that they would actually take a pay cut to be able to have better work life balance.

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So now if we get in and talk a little bit more kind of from the employee perspective, right.

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What are some of these things that are changing in the future. Some of the things that you’re going to need to do different

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If you want to get to a different point in your career going forward because like I said what got you here won’t get you there.

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So if you if you stop and think about, kind of, you know, maybe the experience or the training or the certifications that you might have so far.

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That’s what got you to this current job and you may be working on some of those things right now again with the idea of being able to move to a different role.

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But if you haven’t really kind of gone through that or thought about that, you really should take some time and figure out, you know. Am I happy doing what I’m doing now.

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Or do I want something different. Okay. And actually, yesterday I was talking to a gentleman, he spent a lot of his career in internal audit in the it audit space.

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And he moved around to some different companies kept kind of moving up but he got to that point.

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Where he was the manager and an internal audit the internal audit departments and realized it was going to be difficult for him to move up to that next director or CAE level.

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Because he was not seeing anybody that was an IT auditor that was getting promoted to the chief audit executive standpoint.

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So at that point, he had to make a decision for himself on. Where did he want his career to go and he chose instead to say, Okay, I’m going to go outside of audit and I’m going to move into information security compliance because that was. It was a good

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skill set change for him. He already had a lot of the the technical experience behind it and it allowed him. Like I said to move outside of audit.

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Into a role of greater responsibility, but also have greater money as well. And so for him. That’s actually working out well.

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Now let’s let’s rewind that a little bit. And let’s pretend for a minute that you know I’m that person and I look at it and I say, you know what I think I want to get outside of audit. I want to move into compliance.

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At that point, I could start looking at myself looking at my experience, looking at the training that I’d received. Look at the certifications that I have

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And decide what do I need to do to try to get one of those jobs in information security compliance.

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And so you can almost sit down and do a little gap analysis for yourself and say, well, okay, I understand how to audit. I understand the it area.

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Maybe I should understand more about compliance and so maybe I need to go get some training on compliance. Maybe I should consider getting a certification.

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In compliance something that is going to make me more attractive to the next organization or even to my current organization if I’m looking to move to another position. So that’s kind of the, the, the

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Sort of exercise that everybody should go through

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From currently kind of a career planning perspective. Now, when you’re thinking about that. And this is where it kind of comes back to

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Like it said some of this self improvement self development kind of stuff that we’re talking about today is where or what kind of skills. Do we need and so broadly, you can think about, well, there’s technical skills, those things that actually helped me to technically perform my job.

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But there’s also things called soft skills. Those are things

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You know, again, like emotional intelligence adaptability, your written and verbal communication skills and all of those things are becoming more and more important. In fact, you know, in the past where technical skills, used to be the thing that got you the job.

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More and more now those soft skills are being seen as more important and employers are looking for those soft skills.

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In fact, in a lot of industries, you know, this goes kind of outside of internal audit risk and compliance, but we’re trying to, again, see what’s going on outside in the world.

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And try to figure out how that might impact us, but there are a lot of employers now that are not even really looking at the technical skills that people have

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They’re hiring people based on attitude based on their values based on their cultural fit in the organization.

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And then the organization at that point then teaches those people the technical skills.

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So, you know, again, if you if you are an employer. If you’re someone who is a manager of people that may be one of the trends, like I said, that we’re seeing that you may want to start considering

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In hiring people yourself. So the technical skills are usually easier to learn than some of the soft skills or other specialized skills.

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And so I use this a lot in in some of the trainings that I’ve done over the years is, you know, as an example, let’s pretend that I am

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A hospital. I’m the CEO of a hospital and some of the technical skills that I probably should have would be related to healthcare and

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Medical in general, so it’s easier for me to hire someone who has been trained maybe as an emergency response person.

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Or as a nurse and hire those people and then teach them how to audit, it’s going to be easier for me to teach them the technical skills of how to audit.

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Then it would be to hire someone who is already technically skilled in auditing and then try to teach them all of those medical things

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And so that’s why, again, one of the trends that we’re seeing is more and more experienced people being brought into you know audit risk and compliance areas.

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That their, their technical expertise and experiences in a different place, but then they’re being taught those particular skills.

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So, you know, again, as you’re thinking about this, you know, I want you to as your as you’re kind of coming up with or thinking about your plan for how you’re going to improve yourself. You really have to be thinking about soft skills.

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Is may get a little frog in my throat today.

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So don’t just focus on the technical also look at being able to improve your soft skills as well.

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Now, when we go back and think again about, you know, some more stuff from the survey here.

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There there happens to be, again, some more interesting information about how managers are not really living up to the workers expectations.

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And so as an example. Right. There’s about 86% of people so 86% of a lot of people are saying that their managers are not skilled in developing their employees.

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And so again, those employees are looking for opportunities to develop themselves, but they don’t feel like they’re getting that support from their managers. And so from this, we really kind of learn two things.

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If you’re a manager start providing more support to your people and helping to develop them.

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If you are an employee and you realize that your manager is not providing that you can ask for help and hope that they they come along and actually provide that to you. But if they don’t, here’s the reality.

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If your manager isn’t helping you develop yourself, you still need to take responsibility.

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And manage it yourself. So if that means, again, if your employer is not supporting you and maybe getting training.

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Then you still need to get the training if they’re not going to pay for it, then you need to pay for it.

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If they’re not giving you time, you know, during your workday to do some of the training, then you need to find the time outside of your work day and make it a priority.

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For you to be able to do that. Now let me give you an example on that I teach a lot of people on the certified internal auditor exams, so they can get their ca certification.

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And a lot of people’s employers are not supporting them or paying for that, which to me is kind of crazy in the first place because it’s a it’s a technical skill set and certification.

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That directly applies to the job being done. But regardless, here’s the reality. And this is what I see is people that are successful.

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And passing the exam, are those who take it seriously and who actually block out the time, you know, pay their own money if they need to, to be able to get a higher quality course.

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And then are committed to actually doing what they need to do outside of work to be able to get that certification. Now here’s the reality to right as if your employers not supporting you in that

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You know, it’s still supporting your career and long term again those investments in the short and mid term will have a huge, huge impact to you going forward. So as an example, let’s say,

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You know, again, you’re a senior and you’re and you’re being, you know, pushed up against you can’t become manager until you get your CIA certification as an example.

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Well, if you look at that and say well, gee, it’s going to take me a lot of time and a lot of, you know, some money investment for me to be able to do that.

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But here’s the reality right you pass the exam if you don’t get promoted up or can’t get promoted up in your current organization it now allows you to, you know, be marketable.

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To be able to move into a manager role potentially at another organization. So what does that mean

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Well, a lot of times the jump between senior and manager can be 20 or $30,000 a year, at least in compensation. So if you do the work. If you put in the time if you put in the money.

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To be able to actually pass that and develop yourself. It’s going to pay for itself down the road. So again, let’s just pretend it’s $30,000 of a bump.

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You are in that position for the next 10 years that time and money that you invested in yourself, has a $300,000 you know future cash flow to it.

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So it’s a big deal. And it makes a huge, huge impact in people’s career but it means, again, you have to be the one who is responsible and takes accountability for that and goes out and does it

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If your employer’s not supporting you in it, you still need to do it. If that’s where you want to go. Okay, remember what got you here.

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Won’t get you there. And so if there’s some other place you want to get you have to figure out, and you have to do things different to be able to get to that next position.

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Okay, so kind of moving on here, you know. Couple of other things here from from this, you know, we talked about employers, sometimes not being supportive

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In fact, from this survey 20% of the people said that their employer is not offering training options, right, which means that 80% of people are not providing training for their employees.

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So again, the reality is often you’re going to have to be on your own and just take care of it yourself.

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Now the training that actually is offered is usually more compliance required. So that’s things like you know I have to do my two hours of ethics training every year.

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And that’s the training that employees are providing not the training that’s actually going to help people to do their job better

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So even though companies are investing in training. Often the training is more compliance in nature and doesn’t actually really help to develop the employee.

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So, you know, again, some things for you to be considering. And in thinking about as you’re moving forward in your career because like I said what got you here.

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To your to wherever your current position is is not going to get you to that next place if you want to get to the next place you’re going to have to start doing some things differently.

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And that, again, like, like I said, is going to be some things you’re not used to it might be some things you’re uncomfortable with

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It might mean that you have to end up investing some of your own time and your own money in order to be able to do that.

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But that’s, again, that is part of what needs to be done for you to be able to move forward in your career and get to where you ultimately want to be

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So again, hope that was helpful, like I said. Today’s episode is sponsored by see risk Academy

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If training and certification or things that you feel like you need to accomplish or you need to do in your organization in your personal development.

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Check them out because like I said, they have both technical and soft skills that are targeted specifically for internal auditors.

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But also, most of it is relevant for risk and compliance professionals as well. So check it out and and move forward in your career. Think about where you want to go and stop and make your plan to make sure that you can get there and I’ll see you on a future episode of jamming with Jason