Approvals form a huge part of work at almost every company.
Everything from creative projects and marketing initiatives
to budget frameworks and purchase orders
need to be approved as they reach completion or their launch date
— and this process sometimes causes a lot of frustration.
In traditional work environments, people often approve items only for their approvals to be overlooked.
Why?
Outdated work tools such as email.
Emails can easily go missing.
And even when they don’t, email threads can be so long
and contain so many supposed “final” versions — that everyone gets confused.
Situations like this inevitably affect team productivity and business performance.
Sign-off processes often take more time than the work itself.
This usually results in serious project launch delays.
Wrike helps you add structure to approval processes and lets you automate them.
Here’s how it works:
Start by naming work stages that are dependent on other people’s input
and make a list of all possible approvers for each of those stages.
In our example, these are “Waiting for Team Lead Approval”,
“Approved by Team Lead”, “Waiting for Managing Director Approval”,
“Approved by Managing Director”, “Changes Required”
and “Rejected”.
Once you have it all outlined, you can proceed with building this custom workflow in Wrike
and reflect all your approval process statuses there.
Approval statuses can be auto-assigned to particular people
to make sure those whose assistance is required are notified.
When you have several approvers that need to take action,
just add a designated status for each of them to avoid confusion.
This makes it easy for the Managing Director to create a Dashboard to see what stage any task is at
and to monitor those approvals that need attention in real time.
Being an approver, I want to have more control over the work pending my approval,
so I add a widget to my personal Dashboard to stay on track.
This list helps me keep track of my approvals in one place
and provides up-to-date information every time I open it.
Here in the widget, there is a task pending approval.
Let’s open it.
There’s one more assignee next to my name.
Matt is the person I share responsibilities with.
We have the same level of authority to approve work.
That’s why we were both added as assignees when the status changed.
Apparently, he hasn’t had time yet to finish this approval, so I’ll do it.
I will delete Matt from the assignee section and @mention him in the comments
to let him know I’m on it.
I’m ready to change the status to approved.
But this long list of statuses looks confusing and I can’t see the right one.
That's why there is a way to add another level of clarity to the approval process
by setting a fixed workflow.
This enables me to specify which statuses are available for a task
to transition to its next phase.
Now, approval process statuses are separated
and approvers will not get confused with other statuses in a given workflow.
Aside from monitoring your approval process with the help of the Dashboard,
you can also choose a color-coding scheme to help your approval process in the Gantt chart view.
Just filter the tasks with a certain status or statuses
and get bird’s eye view on how you are progressing with the sign-off.
Need to drill down and get more details before a status update meeting?
Just create a report to provide yourself with all the necessary information
on each stage of the approval process.
Having a clearly established approval process can bring lots of value to your business.
When it is streamlined and automated
you bring your business to a new level of transparency and accountability.
People spend less time waiting to have their work approved
and can check any time where the work is at in terms of approval and who has already signed off.
All the items are automatically assigned to the necessary people,
which leaves no room for mistakes and miscommunication.