Understand the skill set and staffing needs of Internal Audit activity is split into two parts. The first two things are obviously the organization and your team members. We’ve got to have people available to talk when needed.
The second thing in terms of resourcing is we need to have a system for them to follow. If you have these systems we can go out there and say, what are you guys doing or what process are you following? They will have a set of instructions and guidance in terms of what their objectives are.
You then need to ask about the assessors – the people that are undertaking the assessments – do they have the appropriate training? Here at Best Practice, all of our auditors are trained. I recommend that you train your people to. The skills and resourcing in terms of doing that will need to be considered.
You have to understand that there are two parts to it. Now it is really important to be very delicate with organizations, labor and the individuals involved as the audit costs money. The salary or the wages of the auditor and the people being audited can start to be quite an expensive activity.
It’s very important to be focused on what the objectives are. The objectives are to verify that you comply with the standard and verify that you are following the planned arrangements. At Best Practice, we have to ensure that our sales and marketing team are doing the assigned tasks and are doing what they have said they would do.
Lastly, look for opportunities within your organization for improvement. Opportunities for improvement would be, can we be more efficient, can we save money, can we minimize duplicate work, and can we avoid human error? Those are the sorts of Internal Audits and objectives that we’re talking about. Following these steps will then help you to understand how we can resource it.
