Strategic Planning: A Roadmap for Internal Auditors

Part 1: How vision and mission are ingrained in a strategic planning roadmap

The strategic planning process is an activity that has existed for centuries. Businesses rely on strategic plans to ensure growth, connection with customers, value creation for stakeholders, and a future of sustainable success. But while strategic planning is a vital business discipline, it is sometimes overlooked as a tool for internal auditing functions to ensure their own mission is successful.

Strategic planning is a topic that is underappreciated and undervalued within the internal auditing profession. There could be many reasons for this. Internal auditing professional standards focus primarily on governance and methodology principles rather than strategic planning practices. Also, strategic planning is not frequently mentioned as a core competency of internal auditors. 

What is strategic planning?

Strategic planning is a systematic process in which organizational leaders define a future vision and identify the specific goals and objectives to achieve that vision. Serving as a strategic roadmap for businesses, it guides growth, enhances customer engagement, ensures stakeholder value, and contributes to long-term success.

The strategic planning process includes establishing the exact sequence and format in which those goals should be executed so that the organization can reach its vision as it is written in the vision statement. This structured approach is equally vital within internal auditing functions, providing clear direction for efforts and ensuring alignment with strategic objectives.

Why is strategic planning important?

Like businesses, internal audit teams need direction and organizational goals to work toward, and it's the strategic plan which offers that type of guidance and then gets distributed through the entire organization. In essence, a strategic plan serves as the strategic roadmap that explains how the internal auditing team’s efforts will achieve the defined business goals. Without such guidance, there is no way to tell whether our internal audit team (and the larger team) is on track to reach its defined goals.

Check out the next two posts in this blog series:

• Part two: "Strategic Planning: How to Create Guiding Principles for Your Internal Auditing Team"
• Part three: "Strategic Planning: Finding and Defining Your Strategic Intent for Your Internal Audit Team"

Most chief audit executive (CAE) job descriptions make no mention of strategic planning as an essential job responsibility. Internal auditors who have risen to the rank of CAE and other audit leadership roles likely have not been exposed to strategic planning processes (at least not from a practical standpoint). This experience gap can result in a mindset that creates hesitancy in pursuing strategic planning for future internal audits. After all, strategic planning is a challenging endeavor even for those with experience.

Without experience or an internal audit roadmap (or funding to hire a consultant), strategic planning can be an intimidating pursuit. Plus, we follow our strategic planning professional standards and have our internal audit plan to guide us. That should be enough, right? So we feel justified in putting strategic planning off until next year, or so it seems.

This blog series shares a strategic planning roadmap used to develop a strategic plan for internal auditing function. It’s intended to be practical and simple to follow so that any CAE can use it as an internal audit management template for creating their own strategic plan. Some of this strategic roadmap is textbook stuff, like having a vision and mission statement. But most of it is tailored specifically for internal auditing functions. 

Strategic planning roadmap for internal auditors

Every strategic plan should begin by articulating your vision and the mission you’re attempting to achieve as it relates to the internal audit process. These statements provide the North Star for your strategic journey. It’s so easy to get distracted in your pursuits, and having an anchor to align your strategic intent with can help keep your internal audit plan on target. Any pursuit that does not align with your vision and mission should be challenged.

What is a vision statement?

A vision statement can be viewed as a dream or purpose for being. It is something to be pursued and attained in the future. The statement should outline the company's long-term goals and aspirations for the future in terms of its long-term growth and impact on the world.

By articulating these long-term goals and aspirations, a well-crafted vision statement for internal audit teams provides a unifying sense of direction and inspiration. It fosters a shared purpose among internal audit teams and stakeholders, outlining the team's future path and cultivating a collective commitment to realizing its broader impact within the organization and beyond.

How to write a vision statement

Vision statements should be a single sentence and contain no more than four key descriptors that focus on what is most important for the team, in this case an audit management team.

An example vision statement for an audit team is:
We are indispensable business partners, with a brand focused on innovation and excellence.

The concision and simplicity of this vision statement ensures that everyone on the internal audit team knows what’s most important. On top of that, internal auditors can easily articulate the strategic intent to anyone. It is also easy to memorize. The words in bold provide the essence of what the internal audit team wants to become, the dream. We, as internal auditors, are in pursuit of indispensability, innovation, and excellence.

What is a mission statement?

A mission statement explains a company's culture, values, and ethics and it’s usually only a sentence or short paragraph.

Your mission statement articulates what your internal audit team delivers to your organization and stakeholders. It’s a statement describing the type of service you provide and how you might provide it. 

Mission statements serve several purposes, including motivating employees and reassuring investors of the company's future. The International Internal Audit (IIA) commission describes the mission or purpose of an internal auditor, “to enhance and protect organizational value by providing risk-based and objective assurance, advice, and insight” which can translate into the “why” for your internal audit process.

Here is an example internal audit team mission statement:
We support the strategic success of management through risk-based assurance engagements, consulting services, and risk-specific agile audits.

What is a value proposition?

A value proposition helps to articulate why your mission is essential. It should further articulate how the mission will be conducted to ensure value to the organization and stakeholders.

After all, the internal auditing service you provide lacks relevance unless there is value behind it.

Value Proposition:

• Provide independent visibility to risk management performance
• Provide collaborative consulting services, including identification of root causes and potential sustainable solutions
• Maximize and continuously improve audit/risk coverage through the strategic use of technology and innovation
• Provide a talent pipeline by recruiting and developing a staff that possess relevant skills and competencies that are valuable to the business

The bold items in the value proposition above identify attributes of how the internal audit management team executes their mission and drives value.

Alignment of mission, vision, and value proposition

Notice how the mission and value proposition themes align with the vision statement above. The mission is intended to be executed with the vision in mind. It includes attributes that support an internal audit team’s dreams of indispensability (independent, collaborative, solution-focused, talent pipeline), innovation (agile auditing and strategic use of technology), and excellence (continuous improvement of audit/risk coverage).

Now that we’ve covered vision and mission statements, it's time to dive into part two—establishing guiding principles. After that, be sure to check out part three of this blog series—finding and defining your strategic intent.