I already spoke of the in a previous posting but I'm in the middle of an audit and in particular on a new standard that my company has never been audited before because while it existed before it has essentially be re-written and now it contains a bunch of new requirements that really just became enforceable in June 2016. I am writing the narrative have never really been involved in an audit to this specificity. I am that guy that usually builds the evidence packages while all the “smart people” write the word involved. I am glad I’m being included at this level for a reason. About a year ago my boss had talked to me about a promotion telling me that he felt at this point I deserved on and he had cleared it with his boss who said he was okay with it, he just want there be justification for the promotion, not just fall back on the rule that says just because someone has been in their role for 5 or more years they should be given a promotion unless a specific reason or cause negates that HR procedure.
I have always been involved in audits at minimum through the preparing of the evidence and we have always had very successful audit. Our last audit I was more or less excluded from the process other than to gather the evidence but I wasn’t asked to help much beyond. What was really confounding was that that half of what we normally use as evidence was not used and let's just say that compared to previous audits this one was not as favorable. I can’t take credit for my lack of involvement influencing the audit in this way but had I been there I would have defended that concept and format of our numerous prior successful audits which always followed a logical format. This time the audit was given to a person with a Senior title and mostly because she has expressed an interest (and still does express this same interest) in being advanced someday to executive management and this was the type of experience that she needed under her belt. I think the result was that the audit was handled in a manner that was totally different from our previous audits, sadly not the same positive raves and reviews as we have previously received however the lady that ran the process achieved her goal of getting the attention she needed to advance her career. She deserves an advancement, she is a hard working super-smart lady and I wish her the best but I personally think that her lack of experience and over-cautious handling of the evidence and helped to result in the “not so positive” results, don’t get me wrong, it was still a successful audit, just NOT as successful as our previous work.
Okay, so keeping in mind the lady of whom I just spoke, I had been assigned this specific narrative and evidence package as we are handling this audit (again) in a manner which we have never handled an audit prior, it is being divided up among several different people and I personally have been assigned two standard. Since I had never written a narrative to this level the lady that led our last (and first less positive audit) was asked to support me. Now mind you, until her first narratives in the last audit (of which she wrote all of them) she had never had that experience either. I also think that the way she wrote and described things along with the omission of sufficient evidence, stuff that I would have supplied had I compiled the PDF’s that went to the auditors results in their asking questions which then led to other questions and so on and so forth, giving the feel that we were not forthcoming.
She reviewed the narrative she had been asked to support and my feelings (which I know shouldn’t be a consideration in such a process) really hurt. She had actually crossed off everything I wrote and I think I may have already said pretty much rewrote it using a lot of the same what I said. Oh she said the same things, she just put in in a structure that doesn’t come naturally to me and used a bunch of filler “waste” words that just fluffed up the narrative. She also left off several things that I had included that were part of the evidence package as she did not make a comparison of what she had written and what was being supplied as evidence. So essentially my work (other than the grunt portion, collecting the evidence) was undone and redone.
WelI the next step in the process is for our legal and business services departments to review the work. The response was that they found the narrative difficult to read and follow and guess what? This was totally her narrative because I used it verbatim but what goes beyond her difficult wording and fluffed phrasing she totally failed to mention portions in the narrative that was supported by documents supplied in the evidence package. She was supposed to be supporting me, not taking over my portion but obviously my work wasn’t good enough for her and since she was the “experienced” narrative writer who was I to argue with was supplied.
Now in all fairness I did miss a piece of evidence that I should have supplied that she caught because it wasn’t mentioned in the narrative as I had written it and I was totally appreciative towards her for this support and let her know but I was now so focused on the adding the evidence I had omitted I was not so much worried as to how she worded the narrative, I glanced at it and it looked like everything was there but when I reread it after being told by the reviewers that it was difficult to follow mostly because she didn't refer to all the evidence. Specifically they said they don’t know why would you include evidence in a binder but not mention it if, it was like I was trying to confuse the auditors. (could she have been sabotaging me? Nah, that’s out of the question.)
Mind you, my entire narrative had been crossed off and totally re-written and sure enough the inclusion of that evidence in my package made me look like I was submitting work that was subpar. But I’m kind of happy too because her involvement, which totally “effed” up the work I put together makes me feel good because as the person who was supposed to be supported by a more experienced, more educated, higher-paid senior person, it was clear that my work with the exception of the portion I admittedly missed, which was really what her support was supposed to be fore, not to degrade undo and rewrite my work,