The Approver’s Promise

Sometimes it’s smart to introduce delay into your work. Delaying the start of low value work in favor of work that has a high value, for example, is a great use of delay. However, it’s rare that teams use delay intentionally to produce a desired outcome. Delay often happens by accident and produces a negative result. Right or wrong, most people have a negative association with delay.

It may seem counterintuitive, but teams who use delay as their decision-making metric typically operate at a higher level of maturity than teams using priority. In most organizations, the words priority and prioritization have been rendered inert because they have been misused or weaponized. That said, delay can be a double-edge sword too, if misapplied.

David J. Anderson goes as far as to encourage organizations to establish a Vice President of Delay, as delay is one of the most important decisions an organization routinely makes.

Before we can learn to utilize High-Maturity Delay to our advantage, we need to gain the ability to identify and remediate Low-Maturity Delay.

A volume could be written on Low-Maturity Delay. There are many examples of how, with best intentions, we apply our natural human instincts to solve a problem and inadvertently create a bigger problem.

The most common Low-Maturity Delay we observe with clients are approval processes.

How It Starts

Something bad happens, a customer or senior level executive becomes upset or embarrassed, and a process is implemented to prevent the mistake from reoccurring. This scenario can be triggered many ways: confusing user experience, bug, off-brand look-tone-feel, slow performance, poor grammar, subpar code quality, incorrect data, missed deadline, the wrong thing was built, etc.

The establishment of an approval process may seem sensible in the heat of the moment but it’s typically wrought with unintended consequences:

• If the error was made due to a skill deficit, it’s likely the skill problem remains unaddressed and mentorship hasn’t been established.
• If poor communication was the cause, it’s probable the offenders have learned their lesson and interpret the regulation as punitive.
• If irreconcilably poor judgement was at hand, hard decisions are often deferred in favor of oversight.

We’ve found that the speed at which an organization can evolve from a single approval process to the inadvertent establishment of an approval culture to be shocking.

The Problem

Your current workflow is likely chock-full of delays that are the result of approval processes:

• Timelines are either compressed or inflated to accommodate the low availability of the approver.
• Finishing is procrastinated while waiting for an approval meeting.
• Additional approval steps are added.
• Additional approvers are added.
• Approvers provide conflicting feedback.
• An environment of hurry up and wait is established.

The Consequences

The results of establishing an approval culture reaches far beyond simply becoming less productive:

• Delaying the delivery of value to customers will have a meaningful financial impact.
• As project timelines begin to contain more waiting than working, the reliability of estimation destabilizes and delivery becomes less predictable.
• As the team becomes more approval-dependent, creative thinking and independent problem solving diminishes.
• New work kicks-off while waiting occurs, increasing context switching and individual anxiety.
• When approval processes are only added and never subtracted, the entrepreneurial spirit is replaced with the conditions for bureaucracy take root and grow.

Are we overstating the problem?

Delay is discovered like gold, in small amounts in the right places. Your organization likely has hundreds, if not thousands, of concurrent work items in progress every day. Even if you find a way to slice a few minutes from each work item, it’s possible to gain back thousands of hours per year. In our experience, it’s often possible to slice hours and days per work item.

The Solution

We encourage our clients to establish an Approver’s Promise, a simple commitment from leadership to their teams that enumerates their commitment to responsible approval behaviors:

1. An approval process will not be established without instructions on how the team can mature beyond it.
2. Non-blocking audits are preferred over approvals.
3. Peer reviews are preferred over audits.
4. The burden of maintaining daily, high availability to those in need of approval falls on the approver.
5. A single gathering will occur when feedback is required from multiple approvers.
6. The burden of reconciling conflicting feedback falls on the approvers.
7. An approver who is not available within 24 hours relinquishes their approval rights.
8. Approvals which arise from skill deficit or decision quality will be accompanied with mentoring, coaching, or training.
9. The necessity of an approval may be challenged at any time.

The Takeaway

Approval processes are one of many types of Low-Maturity Delay. Applying the advice from this article will start your journey to a more productive version of your team and begin preparing you for our subsequent posts on other opportunities to remove delay.