What is your strategy to create the optimal approval process?

From sending emails back and forth with legal, to asking your team lead to sign off on a document before it is sent to a client. Approval processes are a natural part of doing business, and takes up a lot of time in most organizations.

But just because it takes up a lot of time, does not mean we could be without them. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about creative approval for marketing assets, budget approval from senior management or investors, or legal approval of contracts. Approval is needed.

What we can be without, though, are the bottlenecks and low efficiency that comes from faulty approval processes and being overly reliant on manual steps when bringing a document or asset from submission to approval.

In this article we’ll take a look at what is making approval processes inefficient, and how we can speed up approval.

What is the definition of an approval process?

An approval process or approval workflow is the series of steps a piece of work has to pass through in order to be approved. The steps typically involve different departments and employees who review the work from different perspectives.

For instance, marketing could be included for creative or design approval, while finance could be included for budget approval and legal could be included for, well, legal approval.

Whether an organization has specified approval workflows or not, an approval process usually takes place. The primary reason for specifying your approval workflows, is to decrease the time spent on the process itself while also increasing the quality of the work.

What is an approval management software?

Approval processes are often carried out manually, which means that they are prone to risk as things like papers disappear, e-mails are overlooked and deadlines are missed because of misunderstandings, unclear placement of responsibility, or simply because an approval workflow was not initiated.

An approval management software, also sometimes referred to as an approval management system, helps automate the approval process to bring down any errors related to the approval process. At the same time it helps document approval so there won’t be any questions as to who approved a specific release.

The questions you need to answer before creating your approval processes

Before you specify what your approval process will look like, you need to understand why you need an approval process, who will be involved, and what the goal of your approval process is.

So, before you do anything, ask yourself:

• Is the approval process in question for creative, business, legal or compliance reasons? 
• Do you need approval in the draft stage of your workflow or is it approval for the finished document/asset?
• How many people will be involved in the approval of each document/asset, and as a subset of this question, how many approval rounds will each asset go through?
• Is there a way to reduce the number of approval rounds?
• Could you distribute the approval efforts throughout the workflow instead of doing all approvals at one stage in the process?
• What are the most typical corrections made after an approval round, and can some of these corrections be substituted with better project guidelines? 

These questions should help you better understand what your approval strategy needs to look like.

The benefits of using an approval management software

Once you have defined your approval process, you need to ask yourself whether this process is viable as a manual process carried out through emails and direct messages or if you need approval management software to help speed up the process.

Your first thought might be that getting software sounds expensive compared to just handling it as a manual process. And for simpler approval processes, like creative approval in small teams, you might be right.

But you need to remember that for most employees, approval isn’t the main function of their job. Which means that involving them in multiple rounds of approval will take away from their productivity.

Additionally, manual approval processes have an increased risk of error. Documents disappear, messages are overlooked, the wrong version of an asset is submitted for approval and suddenly deadlines are missed.

When you use approval software to handle the workflow, your approval process usually becomes more dynamic, as you can automate notifications and communication based on tasks within the workflow. This becomes especially valuable in content creation processes where a single asset can be passed back and forth a bunch of times and the process may be rolled back several steps because of a change in direction.

On top of that, it will ensure that no one needs to chase down final approval from a project manager or senior executive–the software will notify them and remind them about deadlines automatically.

Integrate approval workflows into the way you work

In general there are two ways organizations tend to manage approval processes. They either create an approval template in their project management software but leave it a manual process—which is only slightly better than managing it via emails—or they manage their approval process through an approval management system which does not fully integrate with the tools they use to manage their day-to-day work.

But this doesn’t have to be the case. Your approval process can be a natural, almost invisible, part of the way you work. With the Encodify platform you can have one solution to manage both approvals and your general tasks and projects.

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