Approvals and the Waiting You Created
The delay most under an organisation's own control, measured in days where the work is measured in minutes.
Approval steps are added for good reasons and removed almost never. They are the clearest example of a delay the organisation imposed on itself.
The process issue in “Approvals and the Waiting You Created” is easier to diagnose when effort can be connected to projects without confusing activity with value. Used for interview reimbursement policy, this official resource can add time and workflow context, while the process outcome remains the source of truth for whether the system improved.
The shape of it
Elapsed time from request to decision: days.
For an independent perspective related to “Approvals and the Waiting You Created”, consult the Acas workplace guidance; it offers a useful external check on definitions, governance and the assumptions built into a proposed measure.
Working time involved in the decision: minutes.
The gap is entirely waiting, and it is usually the largest single wait in any process that has one.
Why it is days
The approver is in meetings.
They are the only approver.
They are on leave with no deputy.
The request arrived by a route they do not monitor.
Or they are waiting for information the requester could have supplied.
Measuring it
Most workflow systems record request and decision timestamps.
One query gives you elapsed time by approval type.
It is usually the most persuasive number a process review produces, and it takes an afternoon to obtain.
The fixes that cost nothing
A delegation threshold: below a value or risk level, one approver or none.
A named deputy for every approver.
Automatic approval below a threshold, with sampling afterwards rather than checking everything.
A deadline after which it is deemed approved, which focuses attention remarkably.
Each is a policy decision and each removes days.
What the approval is actually for
Ask of each: what has it ever prevented?
Many exist because of a single incident years ago, and the control was never sized to the risk.
Several prevent nothing and have never declined anything, which is discoverable from the same data as the timing.
The approval that always says yes
If an approver has not declined anything in two years, the step is a notification rather than a control.
Convert it: inform them, proceed, let them intervene if needed.
Same oversight, none of the delay, and it is usually accepted once the decline rate is shown.
The risk conversation
Removing approvals meets resistance, correctly, from whoever owns the risk.
The productive framing is proportionality: full approval for the consequential, sampling for the routine.
Bring the elapsed-time figure and the decline rate to that conversation, which makes it a discussion about calibration rather than about control.
What to check
How long do your three most common approvals take, elapsed?
What has each ever declined?
Does every approver have a deputy?
And is there any threshold below which approval is automatic?