Bottlenecks and Approvals: The Slowest Two-Step

Written by: David Carneal – Digital Efficiency Consulting Group – DECG

Read Time: 2 min

Most teams don’t have an execution problem. They have a waiting problem.

Work piles up behind one team, one person, or one “special process.” Then approvals show up to finish the job: decisions die in inboxes, and “quick sign-off” becomes a two-week vacation.

What a bottleneck leak looks like

• Everything queues behind one step.
• People learn to work around the bottleneck (and create more mess).
• The reason for the bottleneck is usually tradition: “we’ve always done it this way.”

How to find your real bottleneck

Don’t ask who’s “busy.” Ask where work sits.

Look for:

• shared inboxes with “pending” labels
• ticket queues that never hit zero
• one person who reviews everything “for consistency”
• steps that require a special tool or tribal knowledge

The bottleneck is where lead time goes to die.

Approvals: value or anxiety?

Approvals are useful when they prevent real risk. They’re expensive when they exist to reduce someone’s anxiety.

Ask:

• What decisions require approval, and why?
• What risk does this approval actually reduce?
• Could we replace it with a rule (thresholds, templates, guardrails)?

If nobody can explain the rule, approvals are running on vibes.

Two quick wins that usually work

1. Approval thresholds

• Approve only what crosses a real threshold (dollars, risk, customer impact).
• Everything else follows a default standard.

1. Queue limits (WIP limits)

• Limit how many items can be “in review” at once.
• When the queue hits the limit, upstream work pauses or shifts.

This prevents the silent buildup that turns into “urgent” later.

Make decisions faster with a default path

When a decision stalls, define a default:

• If no response within 48 hours, the default option proceeds.

People will respond faster when silence has consequences.

A mini audit you can run this week

Pick one approval step that regularly slows work. Then:

• list what is being approved
• list who approves
• list the reason
• set one threshold
• set one SLA (response time)

That’s a real process improvement. No banners required.

CTA: Choose one bottleneck step and one approval step. Add an SLA and a default path, then measure decision latency for two weeks. If you want help identifying the biggest queue in your workflow, DECG can run a short working session to surface it fast.