Most teams treat audit readiness as a sprint. The regulator schedules a visit; the team scrambles to assemble what they need. The exercise is exhausting and rarely produces a complete pack. A better approach is to treat audit readiness as a continuous state.
A small set of always-ready answers
- Where is the captured evidence for any date in the last twenty-four months?
- Who held custody of any specific export, and what could they have changed?
- What did the project programme look like at any specific date?
- Which incidents were reported, by whom, and what did closeout look like?
A team that can answer those four questions in minutes is audit-ready. A team that cannot is going to spend two weekends assembling answers that should be a click away. The state is the goal; the sprint is what happens when the state has been neglected.
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