Why do approvals take so long, and how do you find the bottleneck?

Silence is the failure mode

Approvals almost never get refused. They wait. The approver is on leave, or in a meeting, or holding four hundred emails, and the request ages in a queue that nobody is measuring.

Which means the fix is rarely a better decision. It is an SLA with escalation, and delegation-on-absence — turning silence into a decision, which is a governance improvement that arrives disguised as a convenience feature.

Sequential-everywhere is a self-inflicted wound

Most organisations default to sequential approvals because it feels more controlled. Each approver waits for the last, delay stacks, and a purchase order takes eleven days for reasons nobody actually chose.

Use sequential only where a later approver genuinely needs the earlier decision. Use parallel where they do not — which is considerably more often than the org chart implies.

And watch for the rules people route around

A threshold with orders splitting just beneath it. Disposals bundled to sit just under a limit. Transfers arriving in a suspiciously regular sequence of sub-threshold amounts.

That is not a rule being complied with. It is a rule being managed around, and the pattern is visible in the data long before anyone will say so out loud. Either the threshold is wrong, or the process behind it is too painful to use — and both of those are fixable, once you admit which one it is.

Terms

• Approval Workflow