How do you route a request through approval and several departments?

Describe the route in advance as part of the service: who approves before work starts, which departments do their part and in what order, and who is responsible for the request as a whole. Then every step has an assignee and a due date, and both the manager and the employee can see which step the request is at, without emails asking "who has it now?"

Why a request gets stuck between departments

Each department sees only its own part. Facilities doesn't know the manager has already approved the new hire, and IT finds out about them on their first day. The new employee arrives on Monday, there's no laptop and no badge, and the first paid day is spent waiting. The usual cause: the approval lives in an email, the handoff lives in a forwarded message, and nobody has the full picture.

This is a common starting point. At ITG Corporation, before the platform, an employee had to contact each department separately, track the status in different systems, and coordinate actions manually.

Manager approval comes before the work

For each service, decide whether approval is needed and who gives it: the requester's manager, the budget owner, or the head of the fulfilling department. Make approval the first step: the department doesn't start work until there's a decision, and doesn't waste time on something that will be rejected. If there are several approvers, agree on a rule: one "yes" is enough, everyone must approve, or the majority decides.

Keep the approver's decision and comment in the request itself, so every department on the route can see them, rather than in an email that someone has to attach by hand.

Handoffs between departments

The request stays a single request, and each department gets its own task in it:

• HR handles the paperwork;
• IT provides the laptop and the user account;
• security issues the badge;
• facilities prepares the workstation.

For each service, decide in advance what runs in parallel and what waits for the previous step, and what information each department needs so it doesn't have to ask again. Assign the task to the department's group: if the assignee is out sick, a colleague will pick it up.

This is how onboarding works at ITG Corporation now: when an HR specialist creates a request for a new employee, the system automatically creates the related tasks. IT prepares the workstation and accounts, facilities prepares the office space, and accounting adds the employee to payroll.

Who owns the request

A request has one owner, usually the department that receives it; for a new hire, that's HR. The owner watches the whole route, answers the employee, and closes the request when all departments have done their part. The service owner in each department is responsible for their own step and its due date. Learn more in the answer on what can go wrong when accounting and facilities join an ITSM system.

How to see where a request is stuck

• Status and assignee for each step: "awaiting manager approval," "in progress in facilities," "waiting for IT."
• A due date for each step, not just for the request as a whole: this shows which step took the time.
• The number of handoffs. If a request moves from group to group several times, the service route is described inaccurately and should be fixed.
• A summary for department heads: how many requests are awaiting approval, and how many steps are overdue and in which department.
• Status for the employee: they can see which step their request is at and don't write to three departments asking "where is it?"

How it works in SimpleOne ESM

SimpleOne ESM is a set of SimpleOne platform tools for managing internal services (enterprise service management, ESM). Each department has its own service catalog on the shared portal. Department work is handled as tasks with an assignment group, an assignee, and a status, and the approver makes a decision on the portal: a widget shows all approvers and their decisions.

How to choose a system for requests like these is covered in the answer on software for requests that need approval and several departments.