Teachable Moments: Frustrations are Opportunities

Jacqueline Rowland, PMP, is the Assistant City Auditor, City of Colorado Springs. Jacqueline earned her Bachelor of Business Administration from University of Memphis. Her credentials include Certified Public Accountant (CPA), Project Management Professional (PMP), and Certified Fraud Examiner (CFE). Before joining City Council's Office of the City Auditor in 2006, she spent nine years with FedEx and two years in public accounting. Jacqueline is active in the Colorado Springs chapter of PMI. She is also on the Board of Governors for the Institute of Internal Auditors Colorado Springs Chapter and Mountain & Plains Intergovernmental Audit Forum.

 

Teachable moments are formed when you have done something--regardless of the outcome--and learned from the experience. Learning makes us better at what we do and provides a great opportunity to develop others and sharpen skills. We’ve compiled our best Teachable Moments from our community members for you to learn from and share with other project managers.

My office performs audit projects that normally end in long detailed reports posted to our municipal public website. Since the audit results are posted publicly, they are put through significant vetting within my office and the area being audited to ensure data is accurate and complete.

In my year-end meetings with staff, “reports” were consistently identified as an area for improvement. They took many hours and quality assurance procedures as well as back-and-forth handoffs between stakeholders before they were finalized and published. We believed we could streamline or improve the processes as a continuous improvement of our services.

With this in mind, I attended a professional education event and had the opportunity to ask a Google audit peer how they handled reporting. From the conversation, I reevaluated our internal reporting and investigated options that resulted in a recommendation to my boss and the audit committee to report publicly only the essential information of the audit and …

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