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A mixed month with some training, some risk consultancy and a PSIAS review. I talked to an audit committee for about 90 minutes on their role (this is known as speed training and probably left them with more questions than answers, but at least they are more aware of what they don't know). I ended the month with my first trip to Brussels for a while. Given the number of trips planned over the next few months I might finally get my Carte Blanche back and no longer have to queue or hang out in the busy main hall.
The travel really got going in February: in the first two weeks I talked about expenditure in Brussels and Athens (where it was raining to my disgust), procurement in Cyprus (warmer and drier than Athens thankfully) and then Audit Communication in Luxembourg. And then I had two quiet weeks to do all the preparation for everything that was to come in March.
The month started well and I felt on top of things as I took a trip to Belfast to talk to an audit committee and then went to Brussels to talk about internal control and, the following week, expenditure. And that is where everything changed. I started the week with a full diary and ended it with an empty one as the realities of Covid-19 hit home. To be asked to leave a building mid-course because of an infection risk is a sobering experience. And then to sit on a Eurostar with only six people in my carriage after the crowded journey the previous day really brought the realities home to me. I am so thankful that I have been in business for many years: I can be confident that my clients will come back to me and I have a sufficiently large financial cushion to ride this out but for my colleagues and friends who have only been independent consultants for a year or so it must be frightening times.
After two weeks of head scratching and "now what"ing, I began to discover the dubious delights of Skype meetings, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, WebEx and others whose names I can't remember. My two weeks in Jamaica in April may not be happening in person, but technology and needs must can make many interestsing things happen. Towards the end of the month, we had a few long meetings with the Internal Audit Directorate in Jamaica and it was all systems go.
The month in which I became a techie! After watching lots of YouTube videos to show me how, I recorded and edited a number of videos to provide training on quality assurance for internal auditors (Standard 1300 of the IPPF). By trial and error, I found out about lighting, camera levels and positioning and the vital importance of pressing the mute button when you don't want sounds off to be picked up (my daughter's sneeze through two closed doors proved impossible to edit out). And then we trained "in" Jamaica. Apart from dealing with the six hour time difference, which limited our options for course times, it all went surprisingly well. I also delivered a whole day course for people new to internal audit online.
What have I learned? It's even more exhausting to deliver online than in person, having a support trainer is invaluable, a whole day is a very long time when spent online, the materials need to be designed for online delivery for it to work well, it's harder work for the delegates too, if they really want to get the benefit. And the importance of the mute button.
Will I transfer everything online? Absolutely not! But maybe I shall think more about what is possible rather than automatically jumping in the car/on the train to meet face-to-face.
I've also discovered how nice my garden can look if tended to regularly. Bumper crops of everything this year!
And so we continue. I've virtually travelled back to Jamaica again, planned training (virtually) in Germany, Brussels and Italy and, fingers crossed, edited courses for face-to-face work in the autumn. In the gaps, I have finally written a brochure of all the training that I provide, something that has been on the to-do list for longer than I care to admit.
I've also learnt a lot about the understanding of risk and how being rational doesn't always play well in a pandemic.
My next piece of work is something new: training the trainer. How do I teach people to do what I do instinctively and what I have learnt to do by osmosis? Back to YouTube and Google again, to realise that it's all about telling stories, something that I have done every since I can remember. And the other challenge is, how do I teach trainers to train face-to-face but when I am thousands of miles away and just a face on a screen. Hmmm. Some more thinking needed here I suspect.
This has been the longest period that I have spent at home since I started Tilia Solutions and, apart from the benefits to my garden and home-made wardrobe, it has made me reflect on the value of travel in providing me with much-needed downtime. Travel is the perfect start and end to a project, going to the client means that you concentrate on one thing at a time and, generally, finish something before moving onto the next thing. In the last few months, I've been running some big projects simultaneously and delivered back-to-back training because I could (physically) but I do wonder if it was for the best. Over June I have flitted back and forth between Jamaica, Brussels, Italy, Spain, Germany, New York and maybe others that I don't even know about. I have trained, held meetings, reviewed documents, interviewed people, written reports, revised slides for online delivery and devised an exam paper. I have explored new tools to improve online training and got better at using the mute button, screen sharing, starting polls (and closing them) but give me face-to-face training any day. What I have struggled with is finishing anything: the wisteria is almost pruned, the dress is nearly finished, the reading is just about done, the exam is lacking just one question. This way of working is a nightmare for those of us who only finish things with very concrete deadlines. Ah well - today I shall write that last question and the exam paper will be done ....
It is all beginning to blur - what happened when? What did I do when? In normal times, July is a quiet month finishing with a wonderful week of singing at Milton Abbey. Well, I got the exam paper finished, finished and wore the dress and dealt with the wisteria. I also picked and froze all my soft fruit and began enjoying my raspberries and tomatoes. One big project ended (training on EQAs), another reached draft report stage (looking at internal controls) and we did the preparation for another big exercise (determining a risk appetite statement). I also did a half day of online training to see if the internal control and risk management course could be delivered like that. It can. And, as the lockdown eased, I had a few socially-distanced visitors and made a few trips. Needless to say, there was no singing at Milton Abbey ... maybe next year.
Normally a month of rest but this time spent on back-to-back interviewing all over the world, sometimes simultaneously (Cairns, Albania and home all it once on one notable occasion) and regretting the trip to New York that should have come with this job. And the purpose of the interviews? To find out more about the UN body that we are helping to develop a risk appetite statement. In between the interviews, I wrapped another project looking at internal control in a small body.
And so it continues ... a mix of interviews "in" America and elsewhere to discuss risk appetites and then bringing that together into a draft statement, and some more online training. The delivery improves each time as we are all becoming more used to making this work. I spoke about the expenditure lifecycle, internal control and risk and took on a new course about the internal audit standards. This forced me to re-read the standards thoroughly for the first time for several years and I noticed a few little nuances that had begun to slip my mind. It's always good to go back to basics occasionally. I also went back to audit committee training for the first time since lockdown. Again, it's surprising what you can do if you put your mind to it. No, it wasn't as interactive as a face-to-face course would be, but it worked surprisingly well and the delegates said they got a lot out of it. One of the plus sides of this strange way of working is that I nearly always train with a co-trainer, something that I have always valued as a support and additional learning for me.
Back in March, we set up a PSIAS review for October, quite confident that everything would be back to normal. What fools! But we took a deep breath, went online and it worked. Yes, it would have been easier and more effective in person, but we managed. From the reviewing point of view, it was an easy and dull piece of work as they pretty much dot every i and cross every t, but I was able to challenge them to improve in some areas and I also picked up some new ideas to share with others, especially around having rolling QAIP activities across the team. If you are curious to know more, get in touch.
October was also the month in which I discovered ethics. Before you panic, I don't mean personally but as a trainer and I developed and delivered my first few sessions of ethics training. In between, I delivered the fraud training (yes they do overlap) that I should have delivered in Athens in March, another session that we thought postponing to October would mean I could do in person. And I delivered another new course, about written communication for auditors. Not the most exciting, but it was quite fun nerding out about grammer and trying to work out why a sentence was wrong or could be phrased better. The best part of this was spending time with three non-first-language English speakers and going through some of their writing word by word to try to improve it. I remain in awe at their ability to write so fluently in a second/third/fourth language and we all enjoyed comparing formal writing styles in British English to American English to European Commission English and then their native languages.
And the UN project, developing the risk appetite statement rumbled on in the background.
This was mostly a month of preparing courses and then delivering them. I helped a parish council with some risk advice and training, did a review of the audit committee, risk management and general governance arrangements at a multi academy trust (a steep learning curve for all of us I think) and I delivered some internal audit training to UK clients. I also edited an introduction to internal audit course for online delivery and successfully delivered it with my lovely Commission co-trainer and I wrote a course on online audit meetings to replace the in-person audit communication course I was due to deliver. I learnt a lot from developing and then delivering the course and a good time was (I think) had by all. I also did a little more ethics training and we got the risk appetite statement to a position where it could go out for broad consultation. Hooray!
The usual gradual wind-down to Christmas happened (unlike summer, which didn't happen) and I started the month with a validation of a PSIAS self-assessment (another dull review as they are so well organised, but again where I could add some value and make some suggestions to develop their services) and some training (internal control, internal audit, audit communication), worked a little more on the risk appetite statement project, developing guidance to support the statement and then gratefully walked away from my office towards the middle of the month to indulge in lots of cooking and more dressmaking.
So, we made it to the end of a most peculiar year. I've done things I never thought I would have to do and didn't think would be possible, but we made it and we will do things differently in the future I am sure - no more trips to Brussels for an hour long meeting for example. But I can't wait to get back to doing things on location and seeing people. Roll on the vaccine and a better 2021.
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