We're helping out a client improve its day-to-day processes by finding flaws in its internal controls and recommending improvements. It's a small team, and I'm one of them. It's headed by a single person, who's a qualified auditor. The rest of us are interns.
At the beginning of audit of a new department, we usually have a discussion with the departmental head to learn about its process flow. In this particular instance, I went for the discussion alone.
During this discussion, the departmental head, a lady, happened to mention a few activities which I thought could well be automated. I asked her if there were more like that. She mentioned another such instance, where they had to extract information from their internal server. The software they were provided with doesn't have the option to export to a more useful format, say, an Excel file.
So, I told her that we could help them automate such tasks if it were possible. She was more than happy to let us do that.
Later that afternoon, while I was filling in my senior on our discussion, I told him about their problem, and asked him if it'd be okay for us to provide them with that solution. He denied and said that we'll consider that if they ask us on their own.
I didn't tell him that I already kind of promised that lady that we had a solution for their problem. I didn't exactly make a promise. I just let her know that the task could be automated.
I don't see any harm in providing them the solution to automate. So that's what I feel is the right thing to do. How do I convince him to do that?
Note: The solution itself is not that big of a deal. It's a small Python script that saves a webpage and converts into Excel format, and I don't have to invest much time, either. We're already using several scripts for gathering data for our work purposes. I'll just have take one of them and modify a few lines at most.
