As noted by Meredith and Mantel (2012) “The audit life cycle includes audit initiation, project baseline definition, establishing a database, preliminary project analysis, report preparation, and termination” (p. 539). We are going to define what happens in each stage of the audit life cycle:
1. Project audit initiation: This step defines the purpose and the scope of the audit, determines the proper audit methodology to use.
2. Project baseline definition: This step will determine which areas of the project will be audited. It will establish the standards for which to measure the area on. Verify that the performance established by management is meeting expectations.
3. Establishing an audit database: After the audit has started and the
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Before the report is released to other members, the auditor will present the findings to the PM so they can be prepared and not blindsided during the presentation. As the authors mentioned this audit is to help improve the process in the project not to find someone to blame for faults.
5. Audit report preparation: This stage of the audit life cycle will take the information from the preliminary analysis and prepare the audit report. The report will be made to whatever format the organization agreed upon. Besides the findings in the audit, there will be recommendations and a plan to implement the recommendations in the report to use on the project. Before the recommendations are published they will need to be verified an approved by management.
6. Project audit termination: When the project ends, the audit process itself will end after it has finished the last task. There will be a final report generated and a review of the audit process will be done. The review of the audit process is to look for improvements in the audit and how it was conducted for future use.
32. List and briefly describe the ways projects may be terminated.
There were four different methods of termination described by Meredith and Mantel (2012). Termination by extinction, addition, integration, and starvation. We are going to briefly describe each of the termination methods.
1. Termination by Extinction: This
Stage 4: Audit Completion - At this stage, the audit team compiles a report to Smackey’s management as regards
Steps such as interviews you may have conducted, transactional testing, document reviews, the timeframe under review, research you might have done, and anything else to investigate the issue.
The four stages of the audit are: planning and designing an audit approach, performing tests of controls and substantive tests of transactions, perform analytical procedures and tests of details of balances, and complete the audit and issue an audit report (Arens, xix). For planning and risk assessment, Keller will want to understand what is going on at Smackey, including the business itself as well as the dog food manufacturing industry. The team will want to learn what risks are currently impacting the business such as the need for another bank loan, the returns and waste issue, and potential theft occurring with employees. Keller will need to determine where there will be issues with internal controls by asking questions of the different key players at Smackey. Here is where Keller will determine the overall audit plan and set the tone for the engagement.
Given a case such as the Week 6 project requiring analysis, develop a report to present findings and recommendations.
3. The third stage is Fieldwork. During this stage, the auditor should observe firsthand how the company operates. They need to check out all the areas that are less effective to the welfare of the company’s finances. In the case of Smackey, the auditor would note about all the returned dog food from their specialty line that is just sitting on the loading dock. They also noticed that the dog food is being thrown out and then taken back and loaded into Henry’s trunk (possible misappropriation).
(TCO A) Which step of the project life cycle produces all of the project deliverables?
Project management is short term; it has a beginning, an end, and has identified steps to take throughout the process. The steps of project management are as follows: proposal, initial investigation, detailed investigation, development and testing, trial, operation and closure, as well as, the evaluation. There are measurable benefits to using project management within an organization for certain key objectives or processes that need
At the same time staff meets with staff where goals and priorities are communicated. The second stage in the cycle relates to preparation where revenue estimates and possible available resources are determined (Florida Finance Officers Association, 2011). Departments equally prepare expenditure requests as well as forecasts. Once that is done, the chief administrator presents a proposed budget that serves as a reflection of the needs and desires of the community to the local governing body to undertake a review. The third stage of the cycle relates to adoption where a review is made by the governing body and recommendations made. Changes then follow, approval is done by the governing body and adoption of the budget takes place. The next step relates to an implementation where revenue collection and incurring expenditures occur according to the budget. Modification or amendment may equally take place in this stage depending on procedures that state laws establish. The last stage of the cycle relates to evaluation where performance measurement and internal reports preparation takes
Quality Objectives - The quality objectives define measurable goals relative to the company's quality management system. Requirements on the quality objectives are in ISO 9001:2008 section 5.4.1.
You are the internal audit senior responsible for conducting an assurance engagement of the XYZ Company payroll process. This process has not been audited for three years and, as such, is due in the normal audit cycle. There have been no significant changes since the previous audit, that is, there were no system changes, no reorganization of personnel, and no substantive procedural changes. However, during the last assurance engagement, the internal audit function identified several observations, some of which were considered significant. The significant observations related to:
The Life Cycle Assessment process comprises four main stages: goal and scope definition, inventory analysis, impact assessment, and interpretation [2,3].
The project execution phase of the Project Management Lifecycle is exactly where the work gets done. This is the third phase of the project management life cycle, after Initiation and planning phase project enter into execution phase. In this phase literally project get start to build. Whether it is the building house of a project, changing a process project, or anything kind of project in between, where we can say that the work has begun.
Several adaptations to the traditional approaches like agile, interactive, phased, extreme, etc have been made but each will be expected to meet the requirements of the project objectives, timeline, resources, and deliveries of the stakeholders. Other industry standard certifications like ISO9000 and regulations like the Sarbanes-Oxley have also influenced methodologies and processes used by several organisations (Kerzner, 2003). Generally, managing projects should involved five major process which include the project initiation, planning, execution, monitoring and controlling, and then project closing. See Fig. 2 below.
c After the acceptance of all stakeholders is achieved, actual growth begins and a project management methodology needs to be selected based on the major areas seeking improvement. A project tracking and monitoring system has to be in place for improved estimation of project life-cycle.