What Internal Auditors can Learn from Eisenhower about Focusing on the Critical

If Eisenhower used it to win World War II, image the results you can get as an internal auditor.

Problem: You lack an effective system for prioritizing or focusing on the most important auditing activities. Consequently, you get pulled in many different directions and often end up focusing on the low priority, unimportant tasks.

Solution: But there’s a better way: “The Eisenhower Matrix”.

What is the Eisenhower 2x2 Matrix?

The Eisenhower 2 x 2 matrix, is obviously named after the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces during World War II. Eisenhower credits this strategy for much of his success.

The matrix is essentially a time management tool to prioritize internal auditing tasks by urgency and importance.

Here’s how it works:

First, draw a box and divide it into four equal squares. On the left, label the two boxes as “Urgent” and “Not Urgent.” On top, label the two boxes as “Important” and “Not Important.” It should look something like this.

Next, fill in each box with your tasks as follows:

· Box 1 (Urgent and Important): These are tasks you must do. They are both urgent and important. This could include crises, pressing problems, or deadline-driven projects.

· Box 2 (Important, but Not Urgent): These are tasks that are important but don’t require your immediate attention, and can be scheduled for a later time. This is often the box of strategy, planning, and most forms of proactive tasks.

· Box 3 (Urgent, but Not Important): These are tasks that require immediate attention but are not necessarily important. Consider delegating these tasks if possible. They are often associated with helping others, or could have been avoided with better planning.

· Box 4 (Neither Urgent nor Important): These are tasks that are not urgent nor important. They are often associated with time-wasting activities. Try to eliminate these tasks as much as possible.

The concept behind this matrix is to help internal auditors distinguish between what’s urgent and what’s important, in order to better manage time and energy.

This critical technique or skill should be the focus of everything you do as an internal auditor, every day. It’s easy to understand and easy to implement. Consider making it a habit by faithfully applying it every day for a few months. After that you do that, it’ll be second nature.

The key to successful implementation of the matrix is to focus on the upper left quadrant. In other words, you want to focus on what is both Important and Urgent. After you complete those internal auditing tasks, move on to the ones that are Not Urgent but are Important. You would then move on to the bottom of the quadrant to Not Important. For those tasks, you either delegate them or eliminate them.

How can you apply this to your internal auditing?

1. First, at the beginning of each day, identify the most important and urgent tasks related to your audits.

For example, perhaps you’re working on an internal audit program. You assess where you are and where you need to get to. Let’s say you need to get a draft audit program to your internal audit manager by the end of the week. You see that you need two additional sub-objectives and you need to complete the background section of the program. Therefore, you reason that your most important and urgent task is to complete those two sub-objectives.

But you keep digging. You apply the matrix again, and you reason that your most important and urgent identify the two most significant risks related to your audit area that are not yet included as sub-objectives. Consequently, you work on first identifying those risks, then perhaps move on to writing those sub-objectives, then perhaps developing the audit tests.

2. Next, for each internal audit test, identify the most important and urgent tasks.

Let’s say you’re now well into your fieldwork. All lot of things have been coming at you, and your time has been kind of spent all over the place. You want to re-focus. You have tests to complete, interviews to conduct, documents and data to gather, workpapers to assemble, time report to turn in, and so on.

Using the matrix, you determine that there’s one internal audit test that’s critical to the audit. Great. But you drill down further. In order to complete that test you find that you need to gather data, conduct an interview, write up the discussion, and assemble workpapers. You reason that the interview is the most important and urgent because all of the other tasks flow from that. So that’s what you focus on. Nothing else.

3. Work on only the most important and urgent internal audit tasks until they are completed.

4. Rinse and repeat every day.

5. When in doubt about what to work on, go back to steps 1 and 2.

Learn the matrix. Practice using it. Then watch your productivity skyrocket as an internal auditor.

The competition won’t know what hit them.

Check out our Newsletter “Secrets of Millionaire Internal Auditors — Mastering the Game of Internal Auditing & Getting Rich While Doing It” for street-smarts, in-the-trenches internal auditing hacks, techniques and strategies that you won’t get anywhere else.