The control (audit) helps the manager to understand to what extent the activities of the managed organisational unit, assigned to staff members, are in line with the strategic objectives chosen by the company and which are the necessary corrective actions (if any) to achieve the aimed objectives and better valorise the professionalism of staff members.
The problem: the efficiency of the control of the objectives/activities according to the risk they bring about
Withing the companies the uncertainty is managed trough the systems of organisation and control (budgeting) and the assessment of performance (management by obejectives) applied in the relationship between the supervisor and the staff members (or between the controller and the controlled).
The definition of the objectives/activities (what to do) and the moments of control (deviation analysis) are well garded: formalised and expressed in qualitative parameters, of physical-technical quantity, of economic values.
In the control process what is hard is:
- the (continuous) monitoring during the period of time between the assignement of activities and the formal moment of the control (necessary to reduce the possible opportunistic behaviours and anticipate the corrective interventions);
- the transparency on the control modes between the responsabile of the organisational unit (the controller) and the staff members (the controlled), necessary to fade away possible doubts on asimmetries of treatment.
The relationship between the supervisor and the staff members (or between controller and controlled) is managed, in the majority of companies, with the traditional communication tools, such as the e-mail and the telephone.
The responsible of the organisational unit (the controller), during the monitoring of the activities/objectives, faces four types of problems, namely:
- the fragmentation and the mixing of the information make the definition of the state of each activity extremely expensive and highly inefficient (often within the emails, as well as in the roughnotes taken during the telephone interviews, are contained information related to different activities);
- the absence of the historical traceability of the actions performed during the accoplishment of the activities that does not guarantee the equity in case of disputes;
- the limited richness of information exchanged (quanty of data transferred, their personalization, quality of the interactions) caused by the communication media traditionally used;
- the high amount of wasted time of the responsible of the organisational unit for the unavailability, when needed, of the staff member or the the documents that only he/she holds;
SHARED KONTROL®: the CONTROL functionaity
The CONTROL functionality makes the control process (audit) for the responsabile of the organisational unit nimble and trasparent, increasing the efficiency, the equity and the acceptability by staff members.
SHARED KONTROL® increases the quality and the efficiency of the control as:
- enables the reponsible of the organisational unit (or of the control) of being constantly updated (in real time) on the status of completion of the control acitivty (i.e., audit) being performed in the various units of the company (allowing a better programming of the audit activity);
- garantees the availability of the information both to the controller and the controlled, increasing the efficiency of the audit activity;
- reduces the timing of elaboration of the information collected in the field during the audit activity as collected directly on the tablet (comments and photos, else collected with traditional tools that eventually require final rielaboration);
- ensures the traceability of the information exchanged between the controller and the controlled, thus making the reconstruction of facts objective and the equity of judgement in case of disputes between the controller and the controlled;
- reduces dramatically the timing of elaboration of the audit report and that of assignement of the activities for the plan of improvement, enabling the controller to concentrate on the formulation of the judgement and on the definition of necessary improvement activities (the information is readily available);
- guarantees trasparency on the control mode, reinforcing the trust and the cooperation between controller and controlled;
- enables to create and update (in real time) the risk map associated with each organisational unit and e to aggregate data per homogeneous typologies to support the decision on the necessary improvements.