No surprises, please!

Internal Auditor, June, 2004 by Joanne L. Hodges

I'M NOT WILD ABOUT SURPRISES. IT DOESN'T MATTER WHETHER IT'S A birthday party or a leaky roof, I've never been fond of the unexpected. Like it or not, however, surprises are a part of my job, and this issue was no exception. When you work with the magazine's approximately 165 editorial and advertising components--all of which have to be worked and reworked to form one cohesive unit--it would be ludicrous to assume that every facet can be choreographed to ensure that only the expected emerge.

Our first editorial surprise was the sheer size of this issue. Because our page count is driven by the number of advertising pages purchased for each issue, the last few magazines have been larger than their corresponding issues in previous years. This is a great position to be in, and I'm certainly not complaining, but the number of editors who do the work doesn't rise with the increased page count. Even so, we have enough time built into the schedule to accommodate the larger size, so the surprise is minimal once we pass the initial shock of hearing that overwhelming page number spoken aloud.

This is also the first edition of the magazine for which we've used our new in-house prepress system. To date, the previously mentioned 165 parts have been gathered, edited, designed, and proofread at IIA headquarters and sent to a company of computer techs who manipulated the files for the printer. They set the advertisements in place, ensured that all of the fonts, pictures, and layers existed and were in the correct order, and then put the file into a new format before burning it to a CD and having it trucked to the print shop. Because technology has grown by such leaps and bounds over the last few years, most of the processes they performed can now be done by one employee, two computers, some new software, and a high-speed file-transfer site located in our offices. Having done extensive due diligence on this system before signing up, we hadn't expected several of the little surprises that found their way into the process. But, we coped.

This issue's job market survey (see "A Good Time to Be an Internal Auditor," page 58) started out easily enough with the usual preplanning undertaken well in advance of the due date. Several of the categories used in the past were redesigned to include information more pertinent to today's internal auditor, and the survey was sent out to The IIA's membership. The results were given to the author to review, tally, and analyze and he, in turn, put together the article for Internal Auditor. Two days before the end of the production cycle, which means that the pages had already been edited and designed, all of the numbers changed to include a broader field of respondents. Every number in every table along with every number in the text had to be changed and proofread. In the end, it all worked out extremely well, and the information that's presented is better than the initial draft, but there were two of us on this end who almost had a coronary.

To be honest, I can't really think of an editorial surprise that hasn't worked out better in the end, but getting to that point is always a heart-pounding effort.