For auditors, major change projects and programmes present somespecial challenges that are the focus of this course:

• They have high importance and high risk
• Problems can be extremely serious and require major controlchanges
• Issues can be hard to see until it is too late to do much about them
• Human behaviour under pressure is part of the problem
• Reporting is at a senior level and may touch on the behaviour ofsenior people

What should be done?
Many high profile project disasters turn out to have had risk management and governance procedures in place that typify accepted practice. These standard controls were notstrong enough to provide control. This course looks at why those controls sometimes fail, including in-depth coverage of the human behaviour that is so often the cause ofour difficulties. It goes on to examine the early clues that should alert auditors to problems ahead and gives suggestions on how to test objectively things that often seem to be matters of conflicting opinion.A special feature of this course is the stress on controls strong enough to be effective in high pressure change.

Course materials include:

• copies of all slides and exercises, with links to the course director’s extensive website and other sources;
• a set of over 190 potential audit tests;
• a collection of exhibits used in the many exercises, including illustrative formats and other examples of good and bad practice;
• PowerPoint summary of the course in electronic form to help you explain key points to colleagues;
• a checklist of 70+ key ideas presented in the course, designed to help identify those of particular relevance to you and your organization.”

Course Director: Matthew Leitch
Guest Speaker: Mike Bartlett, Head of Risk, BAA Capital Projects. Mike will be discussing 'Terminal 5'

Prerequisite: Previous experience of auditing and of projects in some way.

Click here to view a list of further Internal Audit courses which may be relevant to you.