4 more days

I'm gonna wrap things up in 4 more working days starting next Monday at Canon. Couple of things I learnt from my 3-month effort in promoting best practice and better corporate governance:

1) No amount of policies and procedures or internal controls can mitigate the undesirable effects of intellectual mediocrity of the staff, particularly the process owners.

Actually there's no no. 2, that's about it. Almost everything that could go wrong, all the audit issues that were raised stems from the fact that unqualified personnel are put in charge of processes that are too huge and complicated for them to fully grasp and control. Of course, there're the possibilities of fraud and whatnot, but I'm glad to say that so far incapability is a more frequent obstacle than malice and greed in this company.

Dealing with 'yes-man' colleagues are quite a challenge too. A challenge to my tolerance for apparent lack of intellectual ability, judgment and analytical skills at least. There's this cheesy poster on one of the walls that lists down the basic principles of internal audit in CSPL and one of it says "Never believe what the first person tells you." Professional scepticsm in simpler terms. What part of this do these 'yes-men' don't understand? I'm sure it's very frustrated for people to work under superiors who are distinctly incapable. Thankfully for me it's just 3 months. For H, well, I can only wish him all the best.

Then again there're the really impressive people who won me over despite my initial rather unfavourable impression of them. My manager M and coworker D are classic examples. I would love to have the chance to work under M again cause well, let's just say she knows her stuff. I don't rate D at all for the first 2 weeks but after that I must say that her performance is OK, although sometimes her behaviour wasn't.

Haha trust a temp staff like me to come up with such appraisals...and only after 3 months. All in all it was an awesome experience and definitely much more rewarding than working in GNS. There're no limits to the scope of internal audit, we could be doing financial audits one moment and operational audits the next. There're no standard audit programmes either. You gotta conjure one up yourself and gotta ensure it's the most efficient and effective way to attain your testing target so that no resources are wasted. You're constantly evaluating other departments' performance so you gotta be on top of your game.

Achieve the best results with the least resources, that's what best practice is about isn't it?