Three years ago we moved purchase requests from email into a workflow. A request for equipment, software or a service goes to the requester's budget holder, then to finance above a threshold, and is turned into a purchase order once approved. It was a clear improvement. Requests no longer vanished into inboxes, and everybody could see where theirs had got to.
In the first months, though, requests sat for days with approvers who were busy or away. Departments complained that urgent orders were stalling. So we added a rule: if an approver had not responded within five working days, the workflow approved the request and moved it on. It was meant to stop small, routine purchases waiting for someone's return from leave, and for two years nobody mentioned it again.
Last September finance noticed that August's spending on equipment was well above its usual level. When we pulled the workflow history, a hundred and forty requests had been approved by the timeout rule that month, more than in the previous six months together. Most were harmless. Some were not. Thirty monitors had been ordered for a team that had received new ones in June. A software subscription a department had planned to cancel was renewed for a year. One contractor extension of almost forty thousand pounds had gone through while its budget holder was on a beach, and she found out from the invoice.
The rule had worked exactly as written. What we had not thought about was when approvers are most often absent: the same few weeks every summer, when everybody is, and when a five day timeout fires for nearly everything at once.
Nothing in the workflow approves itself now. A request without a response after three working days goes to a named deputy, whom every budget holder must nominate, and after another two to that person's own manager. Setting an out of office prompts the approver to confirm their deputy. Requests waiting longer than a week appear on a weekly report to finance, and the requester can see who the request is waiting for.
Approvals take about as long as they did. The difference is that every one of them has a person's name against it.
What a workflow does when nobody answers is a decision too. We had made it once, quietly, and it had been saying yes on our behalf ever since.
– Serguey Shinder
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