Well Planned, Poorly Executed — Tip 2 of 5 for Improving Segregation of Duties in Your Organization

As I have aged, living healthier has become more important to me. Exercising and eating well gives me more energy and, I pray, will add years to my life. I don’t usually have a problem with the exercise part; I work out or run 3 to 5 times a week depending on my schedule. Eating well, however, is a different story.

When I wake up in the morning, I mentally prepare my “healthy” plan for the day. First, I decide if I am going to strength train or run. If I decide to run, I then determine how far. If it is a strength day, then I determine the muscle group to focus on. These decisions, along with my work calendar, dictate how long I stay at the gym, but I usually spend 30 minutes to an hour working out. Like I mentioned, this plan is executed every time. I don’t want to mislead you—my muscles don’t always fully agree with my plan, but my determination wins the day.

My plan to eat healthy, however, is almost the complete opposite. In the morning, I put together my plan. A typical plan for me looks like this:  Smoothie for breakfast, peanuts for snack, salad with grilled chicken breast for lunch, and whatever my wife and I decide to fix for dinner. Great plan, right? But the execution isn’t so great. As soon as I leave the gym, I start thinking about the bacon, egg, and cheese burrito at Sonic (there is a Sonic between the gym and my office) with tots and a small coke. Why not, I just burned a ton of calories? I overcome this challenge and stick to the plan almost every time. Snack—check.

For lunch, I typically go to a restaurant. Wherever I go, they usually have a grilled chicken salad on the menu, and I consider getting one for the briefest second. Then, I tell myself that I had a great workout and healthy breakfast, and I deserve a treat—cheeseburger and fries! I will eat a salad tomorrow. Cheeseburger (mayo, ketchup and jalapenos only) and fries it is! Jalapenos are veggies, right?

Just as I struggle with executing my daily meal plan, many organizations struggle with implementing segregation of duties (SOD). Here are a few examples of why this can happen:

1. The plan just isn’t practical. The planned SOD control is over burdensome for employees to implement. When planning SOD, they must make sense for the organization based on available resources and culture. During the planning phase, it is important to include the employees who will be impacted to ensure the controls are reasonable.
2. Technology has backdoors. I’m not talking about super-secret backdoors put in my some hacker, but access controls that are an important part of SOD. It is easy to forget to turn off someone’s access to another function. For example, an employee responsible for approving payments to vendors also has the ability to create new vendors in the system. Someone with an understanding of the SOD and the accounting system’s user rights must be involved in the execution to make sure this doesn’t happen. This person should also be very detail oriented.
3. Poor follow-through. This is like why I go for the cheeseburger rather than the salad, and this is probably the number one reason organizations fail at implementing SOD. Putting the plan together was hard work, but the execution is even harder. It requires a lot of upfront resources to get it done right and it also requires constant monitoring as employees come and go or move within the organization. In order to overcome poor follow-through, the owners and executives have to be fully committed to strong SOD, assign responsibilities to appropriate leaders, assign reasonable deadlines for completion, and consistently follow up on progress to ensure completion.

Dinner is not a problem because I eat what everyone in the house eats and it is usually a reasonably healthy meal (unlike my lunch). Finally, around 8:00 p.m., the cookies in the kitchen start to call my name. This is a battle that I win almost every time because I think back to my lunch and promise myself to be better tomorrow. In the same way that organizations have to be committed to following through with their SOD, which requires continuous monitoring, I’ll always have to struggle to stay focused and resist the call of those cookies!