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Patterns

Workflow, Approvals & Handoffs

Why Teams Keep Chasing Sign-Off

When nobody can see where a request is waiting, people fill the gap by asking. Here is why chasing sign-off becomes routine and how to make approval status visible instead.

Mellorca Patterns2026-10-08

Observable condition

A document goes out for sign-off on Monday. By Wednesday the sender has asked twice whether it has been seen. On Thursday they walk to the approver's office, and on Friday they send a WhatsApp message with a screenshot of the original email. The approval eventually arrives, usually with a one-line reply, and the work moves on. Next week the same routine happens with a different document and a different approver.

The people involved are not careless. The sender is conscientious, which is exactly why they keep chasing. The approver is busy, and the request is one of forty items competing for attention in an inbox. Nobody in this exchange is doing anything wrong, yet a meaningful share of the week goes on asking whether something has been done.

An illustrative example: a Durban civil engineering contractor with about ninety staff needs a project manager's signature on every variation order, a director's signature above a set rand value, and a quantity surveyor's confirmation of the measurements. The site administrator describes her job as "forty percent chasing signatures". Variation orders that should take a day regularly take a week, and the client is invoiced late because the paperwork is not complete.

Realisation

Chasing is a symptom of invisibility. When a request leaves your hands and enters someone else's inbox, you cannot see where it is. You do not know whether it has been opened, whether it is waiting on a third person, or whether it has been quietly forgotten. The only way to find out is to ask, so people ask, and the asking becomes a routine part of the job.

This is different from a slow approver. A fast approver who is not told that something is waiting is just as stuck as a slow one. The delay often sits in the gap between the request being sent and the approver becoming aware that it needs them. Lean thinking describes waiting as one of the classic forms of waste, work that consumes time without adding value, and the Lean Enterprise Institute lists it alongside the other forms of muda. Chasing is the labour that people add to compensate for that waiting.

There is also a quiet social cost. Repeated chasing puts the sender in the position of nagging someone more senior, which people avoid. They wait a day longer than they should, then chase more urgently than they would like. Relationships take a small knock each time.

Realisation prompt: if you counted every follow-up message sent in your business this week that asked "did you see this?", how many hours would it add up to?

Identification

This is a pattern of untracked approval status. The visible symptom is a team that spends time chasing sign-off. The common assumption is that approvers need to be more responsive, or that people need to follow up politely and persistently. The structural cause is that requests travel as messages rather than as tracked items with an owner, a due date and a visible state.

The published Pattern why one approval holds up an entire process looks at how a single approval can stall everything after it, and when waiting for approval costs more than the approval protects examines whether the control is worth its delay. This Pattern is narrower: it is about the effort of finding out where a request is, and the habits that grow around that effort.

Diagnosis

  • Requests live in inboxes. An email or chat message has no status. It is either unread or read, and neither tells the sender whether anything is being done.
  • No agreed turnaround. Nobody has said how long an approval should take, so any delay is arguably acceptable and any chase is arguably impatient.
  • No visible queue for the approver. The approver sees a mixed inbox, not a list of things waiting for their decision, ordered by age and value.
  • Unclear delegation. When the approver is travelling or in meetings, nobody knows who can sign instead, so requests sit until they return.
  • Multi-step sign-off is sequential by habit. Three approvals are collected one after another when two of them could have been requested at the same time.
  • Chasing is rewarded. The person who nags gets their approval first, so everyone learns that chasing works and quiet requests wait.

Commercial impact

The commercial value at stake is cash flow, labour capacity, delivery speed and customer experience.

The direct cost is time. An administrator who spends two hours a day on follow-ups costs the business roughly a quarter of a salary for work that adds nothing to the output. The indirect cost is larger. Delayed variation orders, quotes, purchase orders and contracts push back invoicing, which pushes back cash. For a business paying staff and suppliers in rand on fixed dates, a week's slip in approvals can mean a week's slip in collections.

The effect on customers is visible too. A quote that waits five days for internal sign-off arrives after a competitor's. The Impact page on approval queues that block capacity describes how waiting accumulates, and work that stalls when the decision-maker is unavailable covers the cost of single points of approval.

Common misidentification

The usual response is to ask people to chase harder or earlier. That makes the symptom worse: more messages arrive in the approver's inbox, and the inbox becomes even less useful as a list of what is waiting.

Another response is to remove the approval altogether. Some approvals protect the business from real losses, and removing them trades a visible delay for an invisible risk. The Insight why approval processes become bottlenecks explains why the better answer is usually to redesign how approvals are requested, routed and tracked rather than to abolish them.

Possibility

In a better state, a request becomes a tracked item the moment it is raised. The sender can see who currently holds it, how long it has been there and what happens next. The approver has a single list of items awaiting their decision, with the oldest and largest at the top. Reminders go out automatically after an agreed time, and escalate to a named delegate if nothing happens. The sender no longer needs to ask, because the answer is on the screen.

Value-stream mapping, as the Lean Enterprise Institute describes it, shows both the time work spends being worked on and the time it spends waiting between steps. Applied to sign-off, the exercise usually reveals that waiting dwarfs processing: the approval itself takes two minutes, but the item sits for three days. Once that is visible, it is easier to agree what to change.

For the contractor, that could mean variation orders raised in a shared workflow, routed to the project manager and quantity surveyor at the same time, with a rand threshold that automatically adds the director. Each approver gets a daily list of what is waiting, and the site administrator's tracking becomes a glance rather than a morning of phone calls.

Intervention

  1. Record the chasing. For two weeks, note every follow-up message or visit about an approval, the type of document and the approver. This shows which approvals cause most of the effort.
  2. Time the wait. For the three or four worst document types, measure how long they sit between being sent and being signed, and how much of that is waiting rather than working.
  3. Agree a turnaround and a delegate. For each approval, decide how quickly it should happen, who can sign when the approver is away, and what the thresholds are.
  4. Move requests out of inboxes. Use a workflow tool, even a simple one, that gives each request an owner, a status and a due date, and lets the sender see it without asking.
  5. Parallelise where possible. Where several people must sign and the order does not matter, request them together.
  6. Automate the reminder. Let the system, not the sender, send the nudge and the escalation.
  7. Review monthly. Check the average wait and the number of manual chases, and adjust thresholds that create unnecessary queues.

Diagnostic questions

  • Can the sender of a request see where it is without asking anyone?
  • Is there an agreed time within which each type of approval should be completed?
  • Who signs when the usual approver is away, and does everyone know?
  • Which approvals are collected one after another that could be collected at once?
  • How many hours a week does your team spend asking whether something has been signed?

Bottom line

Teams that keep chasing sign-off are not impatient or badly organised. They are working around a process that gives them no way to see where a request is. Make the status visible, agree the turnaround, name a delegate and let the system send the reminders, and the chasing largely disappears. What remains is the approval itself: a short, deliberate decision that no longer has to be followed down a corridor.

Sources and further reading

Related Mellorca reading

Article summaryWhen nobody can see where a request is waiting, people fill the gap by asking. Here is why chasing sign-off becomes routine and how to make approval status visible instead.
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