risk management
Mutual exclusivity? I'm hearing a lot of comments about the relevance and the redundancy of internal controls and especially internal controls development and internal controls training. A number of new management philosophies such as this one - pretty much unknown outside of the French speaking world, but mirrorred
Stream of Consciousness
A strange question Okay, I admit, that may be a rather strange question. But think about it for a second ... do you have other projects than professional ones? Yes, I know you have your family and friends, but do you have objectives, very specific aims you want to achieve with
Stream of Consciousness
Much respect to Brett Terpstra for opening up about his past in this extremely personal post. I've never struggled with substance abuse myself, but I was a very, very heavy smoker from 1988 until late 2007. I'm defining heavy smoker as ranging from one pack to
internal audit
An interesting article on risk register obsolescence I recently read this article by Michael Werneburg which was subsequently updated here. The article deals with the evolution of risk management in organisations beyond the use of risk registers into a risk mature organisation. It restates and reiterates a number of points
Stream of Consciousness
Reading The Cramped Lately, there's been a movement towards more tactile writing experiences, especially those writing experiences involving pen and paper. Excellent sites like The Cramped show people who are perhaps not aware of the beauty and the advantages of writing with a (fountain) pen on paper just
internal audit
Writing an audit report is serious business. But for auditors, it usually is one of the last things to do before closing the audit job and going to the next one. Not all auditors writing the audit report are necessarily familiar with the audience of their report. And that results
Getting Things Done
It's been too long since I've posted a blog entry. Between work and adapting the curriculum of a venerable training program in my new role as academic director, there were not too many words left in my head or fingers. The juggling of multiple projects and
audit academy
Thinking about corporate governance When we think about corporate governance, most if us think about a large and quite often unwieldy set of organisational structures and processes which keep the organisation aligned and on course towards its explicit objectives. And that is what governance has been portrayed as ... An immovable
Stream of Consciousness
Failing to bring home the goods I believe most of us have been in a situation such as the following: we send out a young staff member on an interview, most often one of their first, only to have them come back with less than the information we expected them
Stream of Consciousness
Working on efficiency We've been working a lot on efficiency aspects lately, so I got to thinking about the boundaries of efficiency quite a lot in recent days and weeks. Efficiency is very important, especially in a public sector environment. We are using taxpayers' money, so it
Stream of Consciousness
Development aid is not about punishing people. Not our own people, not our beneficiaries. It should never be about guilt, or about a debt owed. It should be about using our intelligence, our creativity, to make the world more inclusive. It should never be about the typical Catholic rap of:
internal audit
There is a old "new" management wave roaring through the organisational straights again, and it is lapping up on the shores of public administrations. I'm talking about the workplace democracy model that was made famous by the success of Brazil based Semco in the 1990'