Wrike Achieves Remote Audit Success with Communication & Preparation

Though the technical issues that forced remote work appeared to be a hurdle at the time, the fact is that the 2019 Schellman assessment for Wrike actually served as a lucky dress rehearsal for the 2020 assessments. Even though the team was used to working at somewhat of a distance and had built out a working process already, there were still some refinements made this last year that yielded what both sides say was their greatest collaboration yet.

While there was typically one week spent on-site working closely, face-to-face as the teams sat together and demonstrated the necessary artifacts, Wrike switched to video conference calls in 2019. These calls were held to conduct process walkthroughs and requested items were screenshotted and uploaded to for Schellman auditors to review.

To facilitate the collection and review of audit evidence with clients and upgrade the remote audit approach, Schellman also introduced and developed its own collaboration platform, AuditSource. Together, the use of AuditSource and Wrike platform drove audit processes and introduced a theme of continuous engagement, visibility, and accountability—all of which are critical when project teams are prevented from interacting in person, face-to-face.

In 2020, taking those lessons learned from the fully remote audit in 2019, Schellman agreed continue fine-tuning and building upon the audit workflows, including leveraging the Wrike platform during this second iteration of a remote audit. A unique, separate project was created by the Wrike team, who invited Schellman personnel to collaborate in the special workflow that auto-assigned all the requests for evidence to the necessary responsible party. For this audit, all assessment activities, from evidence collection on the Wrike side to the review of the evidence on the Schellman side, happened in the same place within Wrike’s platform. This included all communications, as there was a single digital storage area for records. These new steps taken helped streamline the number of necessary audit-related meetings and allowed all parties involved in the process to keep an efficient schedule, despite globally reaching time zone differences between those involved.

Using the Wrike platform to conduct their work was a “big switch for the 2020 audit team, but one that went smoothly,” according to Brett Hayes of Schellman, who took part in the Wrike assessment for the first time in 2020. “The prep work that we did upfront, as far as conducting our walkthrough discussions and product demos, helped to ensure the Schellman team understood how the audit workflows were designed leading into the project. This was really helpful and put us in good position to execute when the scheduled assessment started.” Christy Shum, a senior manager at Schellman who has worked with Wrike for years, agreed. “Working remotely never put a barrier between us even if it was vastly different to being on site. For me, the audit experience was almost the same. It felt like we were talking about the project, about questions, all the time.”

Though phone calls were still necessary to facilitate certain audit activities and provide clarification, both sides agree that the number was cut about in half, thanks to the thorough preparation and efficiency of the teams working together. Though the usage of the Wrike platform certainly helped strengthen the audit process overall, the company also commended Schellman for their preparation as well. “Schellman seems to have developed really mature guidelines for remote work,” remarked Omelyanenko. Despite the challenges of a remote audit and outside distractions of the COVID-19 pandemic, the team remained entirely transparent and very clear. “We really appreciated Schellman using our platform for the project, especially since they already have a similar system for evidence collection. But even aside from that, just taking into account everything from the kick-off meeting slide deck, the workflow description, and weekly project status updates conducted by Schellman; for Wrike, we feel like Schellman took a great step forward on the official project part of the audit. We had a great experience.” Wrike’s Director of Information Security, Dmitry Desyatkov, agrees. “Fantastic speed. Hard to believe that the audit took so little continuous involvement from Wrike’s side.”

Previous years warranted many suggestions to the audit process between Wrike and Schellman, but this year everything was so clear that it’s hard to find anything to further improve, which is somewhat incredible given the strain 2020 has put on professional services everywhere. “Everything was in place and scheduled timely—not a lot of calls during working weeks, but the ones that were had discussed what was necessary with no fluff, and we covered even more than during previous assessments,” said Omelyanenko. Even the addition of Privacy, which can prove a chore to add for some organizations even when not fully remote, went better than expected. Kickoff for Wrike was a week before Schellman began fieldwork—the new major set of criteria was presented and then discussed internally at Wrike, who pulled together the necessary evidence and alerted relevant stakeholders as to their roles. With everyone on the same page by the time the audit started, “it went really smoothly because we were able to get in place upfront. When the SOC examinations officially kicked off, we were able to hit the ground running,” said Hayes.