Case Study: Archer Integration
Situation: IA team was experiencing significant coordination, communication and productivity issues arising from spreadsheet-based manual processes to plan and track audit projects, resource availability and scheduling. Surprised the Audit Committee with execution misses for 3 quarters in a row, due to challenges in tracking resource capacity and project completion. Too many emails and meetings to sort out communication between teams and leaders to resolve daily execution issues – no mobile capabilities. Team frustration with delayed and inaccurate schedule changes. Poor reporting capabilities on team and project performance in real-time
Obstacles: Existing audit software did not support detailed views of constantly changing resource availability and project schedule at Phase and Project levels. Existing software did not automatically identify delayed projects and allow for easy communication within teams. Reporting was inadequate as well. Reporting data was constantly outdated and the process was inefficient. Historical habits of relying on manual spreadsheets, emails and multiple meetings to stay on top of the Annual Plan. No mobile visibility. Existing spreadsheet-based process did not allow for real-time visibility on any device, including smart phones.
Action Taken:
- Evaluated Audit Prodigy’s Project / Resource capabilities to solve Internal Audit’s pain points (Productivity and Real-time Visibility)
- Audit Prodigy became a Certified Technology Partner with RSA Archer in February 2019, resulting in seamless dataflows between the two platforms
- Implemented a two-way data flow between our RSA Archer instance and Audit Prodigy while retaining essential data in RSA Archer
- Implemented Single-Sign-On (SSO) on ADFS to integrate resources
- Audit Prodigy provided one-hour training to the team and worked with us to rapidly build custom features, reports and dashboards
- Post-integration, worked with Audit Prodigy to implement several enhancements, based on feedback from the team and leadership
Results:
- Team Adoption: The team quickly adopted the new capabilities such as, building, changing and communicating schedules / plans, exception notifications, project / phase completion and delays – including on mobile
- Distributed PM responsibilities between five Managers, including three internationally, rather than two US Managers previously
- Management Reporting: Streamlined with new dashboards and reports. Review meetings got shorter and more productive, focusing on exceptions. Also, started tracking managers’ execution performance.
- Completed 6 more projects (8%) in Q2, 2020 above the Annual Plan
- Cut consultant spend by 5% in Q2 2020 YOY and budgeted more in 2020
