A day in the life...

Getting up at 6.30 am, it’s a quick shower and then off to the station 35 minutes later. I live near High Wycombe and the journey to my West End office usually takes about an hour and a quarter, getting me to my office at about 8.20am.

After grabbing a cup of coffee, I check my emails and our intranet. We have various intranet forums including one on ‘opportunities and threats’ (ie risks!), and I see that someone from our Shanghai business has raised a topic for discussion. Then it’s time for a video conference interview with a job candidate who is sitting in our Leeds office.

Recruiting senior auditors for our small team takes an increasing amount of my time, but it’s worth it. We aim to recruit high-performers – which means that after about two-and-a-half years, they successfully transfer into the business. The last auditor that I ‘lost’ became a commercial manager within our global IT function – he was so good that he only lasted with me for 15 months!

So it’s a double-edged sword. Having to recruit a lot is time consuming but if you get the right people you feel you’re leaving a bit of a legacy for the firm itself. Video conferencing is great for a first interview though of course I’d want to talk to someone face-to-face before making a final decision on hiring.

Next I have a meeting with a senior person in the organisation who has overall ownership of a major business risk. We need to discuss the status of their action plan to address this. Basically, I need to stay abreast of whether he’s successfully managing and mitigating the risk, such that if members of senior management or the board or audit committee ask me about that particular issue, I can give them assurance.

We’re a global company which means our auditors travel all over. One of them has just sent me his draft report on the audit he’s been doing in Spain. I review this for about an hour and then call him to discuss it.

We rate issues by severity on the traffic-light system, ie red/amber/green. Green issues are pretty much observations, where we don’t require management to take any action, it’s at their discretion. With amber issues we require management to commit to actions, and red issues require high priority actions. Whichever part of the world they come from, these issues get profiled at group level so I need to be sure that the ratings in the Spanish report are right..

Now for lunch. It’s a quick trip out to Pret for a sandwich. I’m scarcely gone half-an-hour before I’m back to the office. I find that once I start getting into my to-do list at the beginning of the day, I want to make progress and a longer lunch break would get in the way.

Now I sit down with my boss, our CEO. She’s keen to discuss the further integration of our risk process into the group’s strategic and tactical review processes. I’m very enthusiastic about this, it’s a very positive move.

In fact, we have virtually dropped the term ‘risk management’. We call it our opportunity and threat management process, reflecting both the upside as well as the downside.

At 3pm it’s time for my almost daily teleconference with the members of my team who are based in Leeds and Chicago (although one is currently in Spain). We discuss the audit reports in progress, audit planning and travel scheduling. We carry out audits wherever the group has offices, which is world-wide, and you need sensible travel planning to avoid people living out of suitcases for weeks on end.

We talk about any emerging risks that we’ve identified and how we can cover them in future reviews. We also spend some time discussing progress in the roll-out of a new control self-assessment process which will help our businesses to assess their own controls, and looking at how we can further align with the ‘eLife’ initiative.

As a business in the technology sector, we feel we should be living and breathing leading-edge technology in our work. So paper audit files don’t exist anymore and everyone is encouraged to utilise the intranet and other enabling technology.

Our intranet is becoming an invaluable tool and generally we are now publishing something on it every couple of weeks, particularly with the aim of sharing best practice. Most recently, we issued some guidance on controls over master file information. That sounds pretty boring I realise, but customer, supplier and product master files for example, are huge assets – you wouldn’t want lose them or re-create them!.

I also recently issued a document provocatively called ‘F is for …’. In fact, the ‘F’ stood for fundamental controls, and the document went on to provide a simply written summary of the 23 control activities that we have defined as being fundamental. When we’re auditing, if we find that one of these controls is not effective, it’s an automatic red issue and that can attract some unwelcome attention. We had 84 hits on that site within 24 hours of it being published.

Now it’s time for a meeting with our head of eLife to discuss plans to use head-sets and microphones so that our international team meetings in future can be video conferences operated from each of our laptops, all part of using technology to be more effective!

Next, I tackle the ‘reds report’ – a monthly summary which goes to senior management and shows the number of red issues in their area that are still outstanding and how many have passed their resolution date. When I joined the company two and a half years ago, there were 63 red issues with 45 overdue. So I introduced the reds report and it seems to have worked.

Today, there are only 12 with four overdue, and none of these were in the original list of 63. However, we’re also in the process of ‘raising our control bar’, so that will probably drive the reds up again before they reduce further. It’s a continual improvement process.

That’s it, last job of the day. I arrive home at about 7pm. Time to catch up with my wife, find out what she’s been up to and what my three teenage children have been up to …. turns out that my day has been a doddle in comparison. My son’s in so an opportunity to ‘have a go’ regarding the need for more revision for his AS levels. The girls are out at hockey practice so at 9.30 pm mum and dad go on joint taxi duty so that we can continue to catch-up! After which, it’s time for a glass of wine, a bit of TV – and off to bed.

Philip Thomas is head of internal audit, Premier Farnell and a former chairman of AIRMIC. Premier Farnell is a global marketer and distributor of electronic components and industrial products, quoted within the FTSE250.