Preparing your engineers for their first audit

Staff and engineers are often nervous when dealing with auditors. Auditors ask questions in particular ways, and it isn’t always straightforward on how to provide the right answer. Staff who are not used to being audited often waste time in meetings or say the wrong thing.

This presentation aims to give tips on how to help prepare your staff for their audit meetings. It covers four main areas:

Auditors are there to assess risks or verify standards. In general, they are trying to gather enough information to determine whether the risk is being addressed or if the required standard has been met. Understanding the general structure of an audit will help demystify this process for your teams and help them to prepare.

The audit interviews and walkthroughs are sessions where first time auditees can be nervous. Nervous staff are often unprepared, or overprepare and talk too much. This can either derail the interviews or open yourself up to even more questions. The session will also cover how auditors like to ask questions and give useful tips on how to answer them. Additionally, it will provide some useful guidance on how to (appropriately) challenge an auditor when they are going off track.

Gathering audit evidence can be time consuming and a waste of time if the requirements are not clear. Nothing is worse than back and forth with an auditor to get the evidence right. We will also cover guidance on managing the evidence request process to help make this more efficient.

Lastly, practice, practice and practice! How you can help your teams by running mock audit sessions in advance, so they can be better prepared and able to answer confidently in the audit meetings.

The session will allow for questions to be asked and have a general question and answer session at the end.