Automating approvals without making everything slower

Workflow automation has a poor reputation in many organisations, and usually deservedly. The typical failure is encoding the existing process exactly as it stands — including the four approvals that exist because of one incident in 2018 — and then wondering why nothing improved.

Model the decision, not the form

Start by asking what decision each step actually makes and what information it needs. Steps that make no decision are notifications, and notifications should not block anything.

Route by risk

Most approval chains apply the same ceremony to a £200 purchase and a £200,000 one. Routing by value, category and requester history typically removes 60–80% of approval events without changing the control environment at all.

Escalate by default

The most common cause of slow processes is not review time — it is queue time. Every step should have a time limit and an automatic escalation path, agreed with the people who will be escalated to.

Instrument from day one

Cycle time per step, queue time per approver, and rework rate. Without those you cannot tell whether the automation helped, and the argument reverts to anecdote.

The goal is not to automate the process you have. It is to make the process you should have cheap enough to run.