When the Approval Process Is the Problem

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At a government agency, getting an IT change approved was an exercise in patience — and not the productive kind. Every request, regardless of size or risk, had to climb through multiple layers of approval before anything could move. Those approvers only convened once a week. Miss the meeting? Wait another week.

Worse, decision-makers conditioned by risk-aversion kept requesting additional detail rather than making calls. Requests went in, questions came back, updates were submitted, and the cycle repeated. Meanwhile, the IT customers who needed changes to do their jobs sat idle — frustrated, blocked, and losing confidence in the IT organization's ability to deliver.

The approval process designed to protect the organization was slowing it to a crawl.

I started by mapping the existing workflow end to end — every step, every approval tier, every handoff — and measuring where time was actually being lost. The bottlenecks were structural: too many required approvals for every change regardless of risk level, no mechanism for asynchronous decision-making, and no standardized request format that gave approvers what they needed upfront.

The fix required rebuilding the process around three core ideas: right-size the approval burden, remove the dependency on a single weekly meeting, and give everyone a clear path forward.

Specifically, I:

· Designed a tiered approval workflow that matched the level of scrutiny to the level of risk — smaller, lower-risk changes required fewer approvals and could be automatically approved without human review

· Rebuilt the process in Jira, routing requests directly to approvers' inboxes so decisions could be made asynchronously, any day of the week, without waiting for a scheduled meeting

· Created a standardized request template that captured all required information upfront — eliminating the back-and-forth cycle of follow-up questions that had been stalling decisions

· Developed a clear, user-friendly SOP and trained the entire agency on the new process, giving every user — technical and non-technical — a defined path to get their IT requests resolved

Change approvals decoupled from a single weekly meeting — decisions made in hours, not weeks · Lower-risk changes auto-approved, freeing approvers to focus on what actually needed their attention · Standardized templates eliminated incomplete submissions and the follow-up loop · IT customers gained a clear, reliable path to get changes resolved · Agency-wide adoption supported through structured training and documented SOPs 

Slow approvals aren't usually a people problem — they're a design problem. When you give decision-makers the right information at the right time and a process that fits how they actually work, the bottlenecks disappear.

Risk avoidance is legitimate. But a process that avoids decisions isn't managing risk — it's creating it. The real risk was the cost of standing still.

-Delivery Friction Assessment 

    Mapping the approval workflow end to end and identifying the structural cause of delays 

- Embedded Transformation 

    Rebuilding the process in Jira, creating SOPs, and training the entire agency through to full adoption   

30 minutes. No pitch deck. A direct conversation about what you're seeing and whether I can help.