The organizational structure – in other words, how information, operations, and decisions flow through the company – is key to its overall success.

To demonstrate the importance of organizational structure, consider a smaller company experiencing rapid growth. Like many smaller companies, they will experience growing pains. Forbes lists the most damaging growing pains as:

• Inefficiency
• Constantly putting out fires
• Lack of direction
• Departmental silos
• Unproductive meetings

In larger organizations, the previous list is already well-developed and executed, but smaller companies need to figure it out. Their first step is developing the organizational structure to address the issues above. It will help better define employee jobs and tasks, set out processes to work more efficiently, define a clearer vision for the company, and have more productive meetings, that do not involve the entire company.

Hundreds of decisions will need to be made every single day, just like in larger organizations. And one way to reduce the number of decisions is to establish internal approval processes.

Let’s focus on one type of approval process

There are processes for every type of approvals. For example, approvals for vacation or attending seminars or for a new computer monitor. Each approval process is different.

For new devices, the approval process is necessary, especially when equipment can cost thousands of dollars. Also, technology is a vital part of employees’ productivity. Therefore, let’s focus on approvals for technology.

Four questions to answer when building an approval process:

• What equipment needs to be approved?
• Who needs to approve it?
  • Is there more than one person that needs to approve it?
• How much lead time is required to make the purchase?
• How do we make sure the costs go to the right department?

Approval Processes in VIZOR

One solution is using a request portal like VIZOR. VIZOR is a management platform for IT assets and ticketing that has extensive features for approvals. They include:

• Automatically sends an email to the approver
• Sends the request to many approvers, even if they need to be approved in a specific order
• Automatically sends them an email reminder to review the request after a certain period of time
• Sends the request to multiple individuals and moves it along in the process once a minimum number of people approve/disapprove a request (like in board meetings)
• Reassigns the request if someone is on vacation
• If a request is updated, the updated request is only sent to those who already opened to the request
• The request includes details of the person who submitted the request
• Tracks who is requesting what and their costs

So, is using a tool the solution?

At this point, you might be wondering, “Why do we need a tool to streamline approval processes?” This brings us back to the opening scene. No matter the size of the organization, management is making hundreds of decisions every single day. Introducing a tool, like VIZOR, helps automate the process, manage the people involved, track the assets and costs and remain efficient. By implementing VIZOR, your organization would also reduce the time it takes to approve equipment and establishes open communication lines between departments.

What are your thoughts about internal approval processes?
Do you think using a tool like VIZOR would help?