After I got back from that meeting in Washington I adopted the practice of meeting individually with as many councilmembers as possible after the release of each report. And I track which ones are meeting with me about what reports and the main point of their comments. In these meetings I ask two questions: How’s it going? What was your reaction to that last audit? This has been such a successful practice that I can’t believe it took me nearly 15 years of auditing for the city to stumble into it. What follows in this column is a list of additional practices that have worked for me, and a grateful acknowledgment of the persons who sparked the ideas.
Extended Review Teams. Extended review teams are small groups of staff from all levels within the audit organization assigned to each project. Their job is to review various documents – e.g. workplans and report drafts – and participate in discussions of the documents with me and the core team assigned to the project. The idea, which I got from Bill Thomson of the Arizona Auditor General’s Office, is to broaden the review process beyond an individual audit supervisor’s point of view, speed up review by providing a very quick turn-around on documents, and provide training by allowing staff to see what senior level auditors focus on in their reviews.
Scope Statements. A scope statement is a one-page public document intended to communicate the reason for the audit, the questions the audit will be designed to answer, the proposed audit methods, and the expected release date. The idea, which I got from Barb Hinton, the Legislative Post Auditor for Kansas, is to focus our audit work quickly, keep me and the audit staff on target, and allow me to tell people what we’re working on in a fair and consistent way.
Message-driven reporting. Based on the teaching of Stan Stenersen, a report coach for GAO, message-driven reporting is a set of ideas aimed at having groups of auditors work together in teams to develop the message and story-line of a “reader-based” audit report. Taking time to develop and decide on the message before the audit team begins writing the report ensures that they focus on what the office wants to say and shortens the writing and review process.
Targeting audits. Early in my career I was profoundly impacted by reading audit reports and performance audit manuals from audit organizations outside the United States. The very idea that audits should be “selected” was novel when I first read it in a manual entitled “Performance Auditing” by the Australian National Audit Office issued in 1992. Now the idea of risk analysis as a basis of audit selection is relatively common, but the focus of the Australians was not just on risk, but on ranking audit topics on the basis of their potential for improvements in efficiency and effectiveness as well. Over the years that idea has evolved in our office to a focus on conducting audits that matter to people outside City Hall; that enable the city to reduce, avoid, or recover costs; and to alert city officials to potential problems that could undermine the public’s trust in city government. An example of the result of this selection process is an audit focused on the condition of city streets and ways to improve citizen perceptions of street condition, for which we won the Knighton Award for medium sized audit shops for 2004
Meetings with Individual Staff. From John Nalbandian, a professor of public administration at the University of Kansas, I got the idea that “Leadership is engaging people in conversations that matter.” I try to meet briefly with each member of my staff at least once a month. Initially I thought to do this once a quarter, but I found the whole process so useful and energizing that I increased the schedule. The meetings allow me to stay better engaged with the office, gain useful insights, and deal with problems while they’re small. I ask some questions regularly – How’s it going? Any problems, issues or concerns? Anything I should be paying attention to? – but the conversations can be about anything from issues with the person’s current assignment to concerns they have at home that they want me to be aware of. Although these meetings don’t replace all the informal give and take and casual conversation between the staff and me that goes on in the office, it does assure that I focus some attention on each individual.
Mark Funkhouser is City Auditor of Kansas City, Missouri and a regular columnist for the LGAQ.
Funkhouser on Auditing