Keeping Up with Change with Agile

The phrase “the only constant is change” rings true for every single one of the organizations I have been a part of. As technology continues to accelerate and confirm Moore’s Law (which states that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every two years), organizations have used the latest technology improvements to accelerate their own rate of change. If an IT organization is not pushing the change, “shadow IT” operations are likely avoiding IT and adopting their own new software as a service (SaaS) platforms.

On the sidelines, IT audit professionals are left struggling to keep up with the risk that these new technologies represent to the organization. The only way to effectively monitor risk at the scale of digital transformation is for IT audit professionals to implement their own IT audit digital transformation via a framework that allows for accelerated development, learning and pivots. Agile can be used for deploying and continuing to enhance analytics within the IT audit profession.

When my team said goodbye to our summer intern this year, during her end of summer presentation, we were able to reflect on all she had accomplished during a 10-week internship and how much she had learned about our organization and processes during that time. One of the key findings from our discussion was that our bite-sized approach to job assignments had been a key factor in her accomplishing so much within the summer. If we had tried to explain and design all solutions before starting development, she would have spent more than half the summer learning before starting any real work. Instead, we assigned one or a few smaller assignments at a time, which allowed her to focus without having to understand the entire big picture, and she could then apply lessons from the current assignments to subsequent assignments. At the end of that discussion, it dawned on me that we had unintentionally been applying Agile to her summer job assignments—with her manager as her scrum master and the assignments as stories.

Agile is not a silver bullet. If anyone promises a silver bullet, they are probably misguided—at best—and dishonest—at worst. However, there are many great applications of the methodology that enable professionals to start small, test early, fail fast and constantly apply lessons to the project without needing to start from scratch again. My teams strive to apply those principles to all of our analytics and automation development, and continue to realize the benefits.

Editor’s note: For further insights on this topic, read Chris Sanders’s recent Journal article, “Applying Agile to Digital Audit Transformation,” volume 5, 2020.