For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Is this true with the subprocess known as approval? Successful teams and companies grow and scale, which can require some process evolution. The question is how can teams grow and scale while balancing both compliance and autonomy?
It’s easy to suggest that process engineers “remove any approvals that aren’t necessary”, but the effort to do so can be quite cumbersome. It’s also easy to suggest that there should be process improvement initiatives that are ongoing, but having the vision and experience to do so is not quite so simple.
There are three basic ways to balance approvals with their effectiveness and impacts on productivity. The first, most mature, and most effective approach is to develop and support a formal process improvement initiative, this is particularly true for companies and teams with increasing complexity. Many of the teams assigned to projects like this use several tactics, including stakeholder interviews, process mapping, and reviewing reports for trends and outliers. (For more information on approval reporting follow us on Twitter – we’re publishing that early November)
The second approach is a project to perform process improvement. Depending on how your company manages projects and on the resources available, the scope of this project might be one process or all processes owned by a team of them. If there is a clear problem with approval waste, that could be a separate project. Analyze the types of approval being used and try to fit them into three or four different categories. Once those types of approvals are all captured, building approval as a subprocess in the collaboration system should be a smaller and more organized effort. (For more on the categories of approvals check out “The 8 Most Common Types of Approval”. This allows for more time to communicate and prepare teams for the change. ).
The third, and last, recommendation is to take one single instance of any request requiring approval and make the necessary changes. This is basic process engineering, tweaking the process to request the necessary information to start and sending the right information to each step. Each process is going to be unique and may have its own unique challenges and work upstream. Start small and sneak up on it.
Approval Essentials is an in-depth article with many more intricacies of approval explored. If you’re a leader, process engineer, designer, or application developer you have no doubt dealt with approvals. We would love to hear your stories, tips and challenges. Please ask Wally@KineticData.com a question. Finally, to read more about the technology we use to solve these challenges check out The Kinetic Platform.
Cassy Lueneburg