Overengineering processes and approvals

Business processes, particularly in regulated industries or large organizations, are often designed with layers of controls to address every conceivable exception, incident, or anomaly. Personas involved—e.g., managers, compliance officers, senior executives—assume:

Managers: Approvals shield them from downstream blame; they expect processes to anticipate every possible exception.

Compliance/Legal: Assume every exception is a potential risk and must be controlled via added steps.

Executives: Equate thoroughness with control, fearing reputational or regulatory fallout from missed exceptions.

Assumptions driving process overcomplexity

Statistics & Illustrative Breakdown

McKinsey (2021): 44% of manager time is spent on decision approvals and exception handling. Example: Out of a 45-hour week, a manager spends c. 20 hours in approval or exception management.

Gartner (2022): Organizations with more than six approval layers see process errors or rework go up by 34%, primarily due to unclear ownership of exceptions. Example: A process with three approval steps sees 10% rework, but one with seven steps sees 44% rework.

Process Cause-Effect Chain

1. Real/anticipated exceptions → more approval steps → higher complexity.

2. Higher complexity → unclear ownership → elevated risk of error, rework, and frustration.

3. Compounded approvals create bottlenecks and obscure root exception causes.

Currently Solutions and Their Shortcomings

Solution Comparison