Which practice helps monitor performance, detect trends, and drive continuous improvement of controls?

• A. To schedule maintenance.
• B. To measure employee productivity.
• C. To monitor performance, detect trends, and drive continuous improvement of controls and programs.
• D. To manage vendor contracts.

Answer: (C)

Monitoring performance, detecting trends, and driving continuous improvement of controls is about creating a feedback loop for your control system. By regularly measuring how controls perform, you can spot when results diverge from expectations and notice patterns over time. Those insights become the basis for concrete changes to strengthen programs and reduce risk, then you re-measure to confirm that improvements stick. For example, if you see a rising number of access control exceptions month after month, you’d adjust procedures or add mitigations and then track again to verify the trend shifts downward. Other options describe activities that don’t address evaluating and improving controls across the program: scheduling maintenance keeps assets functioning but isn’t about control effectiveness; measuring employee productivity looks at people output rather than control performance; managing vendor contracts is about procurement, not how controls perform and improve. So the practice of continuously monitoring performance to drive improvements best fits this goal.