Business Process Re-engineering and Application Development Audit Program/Checklist

Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) is a practice of redesigning and rejigging an organization's manner of doing business and rendering services by rethinking its processes, services and operations with a view to optimize business performance, reduce cost while delivering superior value to stakeholders. Re-engineering business processes often require automation of manual and sub-optimal processes and operations to improve efficiency, deliver value and reduce operating cost. Automation of manual and sub-optimal processes usually involve the use of software or application solutions to achieve business efficiency and as such, requiring application development effort and strategies. To achieve this, the Application Development team are required to put in place measures in addition to complying with the required procedures, frameworks and best practices of application development processes and methodologies. Re-engineering business processes involves a significant level of changes to the systems and processes, which require a good change management and control process. Also, it is to be ensured that secure coding practices and application development methodologies are adopted by the Development team to ensure confidentiality, integrity and availability of business and customer data. To ensure the suitability and relevance of an organization's business process re-engineering and application development capabilities, adequate/reasonable assurance must be provided by the internal audit team or persons/department saddle with the responsibility to provide assurance function on behalf of management including examining the suitability of relevant organizational policies, procedures, frameworks, best practices, regulations and laws relating to BPR and application testing. To achieve this, the audit team must ensure that they development a workable audit work program or checklist that captures all aspects of the organizations business process re-engineering and application development process/functions. Application development or acquisition methodologies as well as process improvement methods adopted must put into account relevant policies, procedures, best practices as well as regulatory and legal considerations. As such, the audit team must develop a program that confirms adequacy and effective of application development/acquisition life-cycle, which includes documentation and workflow management, requirement gathering and feasibility assessment, analysis, design, development/coding, testing, deployment, maintenance, update/change management and decommissioning of applications (either developed or acquired off-the-shelf).

The PDF document below detailed the audit work program or checklist that can be used to successfully perform audit of an organization's Business Process Re-engineering and Application Development. The Controls specified therein are general controls, which can be adopted and used within the context of the users'/organizations' operating environments, regulatory policies as well as applicable laws/jurisdictions.