Ahh, summer.  What a great time of year, and particularly appreciated in colder climes like up here, north of the 49^th.  I hope you're all getting a chance to enjoy some of your hard earned vacation to recharge the batteries and spend time with friends and loved ones.

If you attended the conference in Philadelphia I hope you enjoyed it.  As much fun as it was, I'm personally glad it's over.  From several late cancellations by speakers to speakers arriving with unannounced and complicated audio visual requirements, the conference provided its own challenges, now relegated to history.  Best of luck to Amanda Noble and her team as they begin preparations for next year's conference in San Francisco on May 4 -5, 2009.

Back to a more pleasant subject, what do you enjoy doing in the summer?  I like to take every opportunity I can to get out and do some environmental assessments, also known as golfing.  I'd never thought of it before but there are actually some similarities between certain aspects of golfing and auditing. 

To keep everything on the up and up, there are quite a few rules in golf, just as there likely are in the organization you audit.  Like auditing, you can meet a lot of different people while golfing.  The people you meet in golf sometimes don't know the rules or know them but choose to bend or outright break them.  You can even run across people who blatantly cheat, although this is a relatively rare occurrence in both golf and the organizations we audit.  Most people are just trying to play the best game they can and follow the rules, if they know them, much like the staff of our auditees.

But what do we do when we come across these different types of people.  Frankly, in golf, it depends if there's any money riding on the game.  Generally the person who doesn't know the rules will be educated, the person who bends the rules will be corrected and chastised, the person who breaks the rules will be corrected and penalized and the person who cheats will be disqualified and potentially banned from future games.  See any parallels?

There's another more constructive analogy between golf and auditing and it has to do with sharing knowledge and expertise.

Golf is a fairly difficult game with a lot of skill and precise technical execution required to move the ball from where it lies to where you ideally want it.  When actually performing the task, that is hitting the ball, most people are focused on just that, hitting the ball.  They have difficulty analyzing the various aspects of their swing and therefore cannot improve as quickly as they otherwise might.  To help out, a good golfer can often watch another golfer's swing and easily see how that swing can be improved.

Auditing is much the same.  We stand back from doing the actual task and our detachment allows us to see how things may be done better.  The staff performing the task are often, and understandably, too caught up in getting the job done and don't necessarily have the time to analyze the different aspects of how they are doing their job.  By standing back, watching and analyzing, we can improve the "game" of our organizations.

These two golfing analogies reflect how auditors can be seen as cops and coaches. 

Identifying and correcting the person not following the rules is the policing role of auditing.  It's an important role that definitely benefits the organization but may not have as significant an impact as the coaching role.

The coaching role involves observing and analyzing a system, process or operation to make it run more effectively, more efficiently and more economically.  This can be a huge benefit to the organization by making it more competitive and freeing up resources to perform additional tasks or services.  If enough resources are liberated, staff may actually have the time to stand back and look at their own operations to make further improvements.  Don't worry, there'll always be a need for someone not involved in the process to validate its performance and it's unlikely we'll ever put ourselves out of a job.

So, now that summer is almost over and we're all chomping at the bit to get back to work, put your coaching hat on and get out there to help your organization hit that ball long and straight.   On that odd day off you're entitled to, maybe squeeze in a round of golf, or tennis, or any other activity of your choice, to remind yourself that we all have room for improvement.

Jerry D. Shaubel
2008-09 President
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