Operational Auditing: Influencing Positive Change

Who will benefit from this course?

This course is most appropriate for:

• Chief audit executives, audit directors, audit managers, audit team leads, with 2+ year’s practical auditing experience, and who are looking to integrate operational auditing into their service offering or enhance the value of operational auditing services provided to the organization.
• Business 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.