Approval Best practices
Can anyone share best practices around change approvals?
Examples:
– How many approvers is to many?
– What functions are usually on approvals?
– Target cycle time for approvals?
This dependent on your company and industry but here are some rules of thumb
1- How many approvers? As few as possible: specific people should be addressed rather than groups, only those with RACE interests for the specific change and affected items should be included, approval assignment must be dynamic
2- What functions? Perform work, add content, review and coordinate changes, approve expenditures, resource assignments, risks.
3- There should be different cycle times based on customer of market demand vs risk. Provide shorter processes with more risk when approved by correct authority.
True, stortip brought up some good answers. I’d say:
1/2: As few as possible but more importantly, the right people per the process you write out and define in your SOP. Bare minimum is an requirements owner and a requirements user, which often times for a product change means the Design Engineer (doc owner) and Manufacturing Engineer (user). Sometimes regulatory/quality gets put in there too. You can have any number depending on your business maturity and need.
3: Cycle time depends too – consider breaking that number up though to be more specific when looking at metrics. For instance if you had a Risk Level 1 type Change, what’s the normal time it take for that to be released? What’s your Post-Release/Implementation phase cycle time? What is the typical user signoff time? There’s no such thing as an industry standard for target cycle time. Quicker is better, but make sure it’s done correctly.
