Operational Auditing: Influencing Positive Change

Who will benefit from this course?

This course intends to examine key skill sets and knowledge essentials for operational auditors to become trusted advisors in their organization and promote positive change. This course will benefit audit managers, audit team leads, and operational and IT audit staff with 2+ year’s practical auditing experience, and who are looking to gain an understanding of typical operational auditing opportunities or to enhance the value of operational auditing services provided to the organization. This course will also benefit business process managers responsible for ensuring effective use and management of corporate resources, who want to evaluate and improve the operational performance of business activities, processes, and / or resources deployed.

Course Objectives

• Identify how the changing business environment has influenced past trends in operational auditing.
• Examine key skill sets and knowledge essentials associated with a trusted advisor.
• Review key aspects of the project planning process that promote the successful outcome of operational audit engagements.
• Describe operations objectives, and the drivers of associated risks, measures of risk events, design of operations-focused controls, and criteria to evaluate operational performance.
• Discuss the application of business process improvement methods, and tools during an operational audit.
• Define the different types of benchmarking  and measurement criteria.
• Explain how benchmarking methodology can be used during an operational audit.
• Discuss different reporting approaches, and persuasive strategies to attain management’s buy-in to results, and solutions.

Course Topics

Dynamics of Operational Auditing

• Understand how operational auditing contributes to the achievement of the organization's value drivers.
• Determine the factors that influenced past trends in operational auditing.
• Examine operational auditing today in terms of its changing nature, and the application of alternative methods and tools vs. traditional audit steps.
• Identify operational audit opportunities across the entire organization.
• Construct a value proposition to communicate how internal audit can be a high-impact partner in creating business value.

Essential Skill Sets and Knowledge

• Determine how to influence a positive change in management’s mindset about the internal auditor, and internal audit activity.
• Understand the advisor relationship with management.
• Examine types of power, and leadership.
• Assess your current level of technical, and business knowledge.
• Assess your current level in value centric skill sets.
• Engage in creative thinking.

Planning for Success

• Recognize the key aspects of planning for operational audit engagements.
• Understand differences in types of operational audit engagements.
• Employ different sources of information to build business and technical knowledge during project planning.
• Prepare effectively for discussions with audit client management to achieve the meeting objectives.
• Create objectives that identify what the operational audit is intended to accomplish.
• Examine the relationship between, and need to align, the objectives, scope, and approach to performing the operational audit engagement.

The Risk-Based Operational Audit

• Identify the assumptions associated with a risk-based approach to operational auditing.
• Discuss risk-based terminology to ensure a common understanding.
• Appraise alignment of operations objectives with the organization’s mission, and strategic objectives.
• Evaluate performance measurement criteria for operations objectives.
• Determine which operations drive value creation.
• Predict potential risk events in relation to operations objectives, and goals.
• Develop risk statements.
• Develop measures to assess the impact, and likelihood of potential risk events.
• Discover operations focused controls, and methods to manage risk, and realize opportunities.
• Decide the appropriate tools, and techniques to document operating information.
• Assess the design of operations focused control, and methods.
• Evaluate the operational performance of risk management strategies.
• Develop alternative solutions to address operating issues.
• Convince client management about the value of proposed solutions.

The Process-Oriented Operational Audit

• Describe the application of business process improvement concepts to an operational audit.
• Outline the components of business processes.
• Assemble baseline data and information.
• Utilize process models, and analysis tools to discover issues, and improvement opportunities.
• Apply process improvement techniques.
• Illustrate proposed changes.
• Outline the benefits, and improvements.
• Describe the importance of testing, and measuring process changes.

The Performance-Driven Operational Audit

• Explain the application of benchmarking concepts to an operational audit.
• Determine the operations to benchmark.
• Define relevant, and appropriate benchmarking measurement criteria and indicators.
• Perform comparative analysis to identify performance gaps, and opportunities.
• Summarize benchmarking results.
• Evaluate potential performance improvement opportunities.
• Discuss benchmarking results with client management.

Creating a Positive Impact

• Assess the impact of various reporting approaches, and structure.
• Examine stylistic factors, and persuasive strategies to attain buy-in to the results.