Agile Internal Auditing – The Case Back To Normal

Abstract

In a world of disruption and fast-paced changes, today’s internal auditing (IA) needs to be highly adaptive to changing risks. Agile work processes have speeded up product and software development processes and are rapidly spreading to other disciplines, very recently also to IA. This development has received little research focus so far, which leaves IA practitioners unguided in their attempts to become more adaptive. The present research project attempts to make knowledge explicit about context factors which influence how agile IA work processes are implemented and abolished. Specifically, it uses an explanatory grounded case-study approach to analyse the single case of a small IA function which has implemented Scrum for all of its IA work processes in 2015 and has returned to a regular approach in 2018. A within-case analysis identifies context variables which impact agile IA change processes decisively, namely the setup of the change process, the choice of the agile method and agile planning process, and the organization of teamwork and related communication processes. The study finds out that in an already fast-paced and innovative audit team, the implementation of Scrum is fostered by a collaborative involvement of the whole IA team and strengthens knowledge sharing and agility in return. In contrast, the implementation of a lean approach deteriorates the collaborative and communicative practices established by Scrum while the agile mindset of team members and the innovative drive of the team remain constant. These findings call for more agile IA case-studies to generate hypotheses based on cross-case analyses.