Work stalls waiting on one person's sign-off

This is a narrower version of one person holding the whole process in their head: here, specifically, it's the approval that bottlenecks on them. Everyone else can do their part of the work, but nothing is finished, sent, or trusted until it passes through the one person who can sign it off.

What that costs

The bottleneck isn't usually the work itself, it's the waiting. A job sits finished but unsent, because the one person who can check it is busy, out of the office, or simply hasn't got to it yet. Everyone downstream learns to build in the delay as normal, which hides how much it's actually costing.

What tends to help

Usually it isn't about removing the expert, it's about giving other people, or a system, a way to check the parts of the job that don't actually need that level of judgement, so the expert's time goes on the parts that do.

A high-voltage speciality cable manufacturer had exactly this: every quote had to pass through the one engineer who understood the maths behind a cable's construction, and it took about a week to get a quote out of the door.

Work out what the same pattern is costing in your business with the admin cost calculator, or see how the Admin Automation Audit maps it.