Improve Your Approval Process

Improve Your Approval Process

• Have you ever had to search through your mailbox for an email to prove you had approval for something?

• Have you ever had verbal approval and wanted to quickly get something on record?

• Have you ever wanted an easily accessible history somewhere for quick reference?

Approvals on the Microsoft 365 platform really is a great way to handle approvals in a simple way. Out of the box it allows people to send approval requests to one or more people. The approvers can approve or reject the request and log comments. A history is available for future reference.

One of the things I really like about where Microsoft is taking functions like Approvals is that people can access these in different ways. Prefer email? No worries. Want a direct interaction in MS Teams? Easy. Prefer a portal that lists these? Choose between the app in Teams or the Power Automate portal.

In this small series of blog posts I want to focus on three areas:

Basic Approvals

Scenario: You want to send a document to your boss for approval.

This is an easy one that I recommend playing around with internally.

---

Note: Some organisations do not enable Approvals in MS Teams, if this is the case and you want to trial the function, talk to your IT Administrators. Also, feel free to reach out if you would like to engage us in exploring the use of Approvals in your organisation.

---

Sending a request

Open a chat with the person you will be sending the approval to. Click the approval icon in the chat to bring up the new approval form.





Give the approval a title and fill out the description with enough information for the approver to properly assess the request. I you are not making the request directly to one person you may want to add multiple approvers. If so, also specify if ALL the approvers need to approve the request. If there is a document included in the process, attach this via the attachment button.

Now you will see that you have a request awaiting approval.

Responding to a request

The process for an approver is very simple.

For the requests that come through in MS Teams they can:

1. Click View Details
2. Add comments
3. Click either Reject or Approve

Pretty simple, right? We will look at other options for handling approvals in another post.

This has been a very quick overview of some basic aspects of approvals. With some thought, many organisations may find a place for Approvals that improves the experience for everyone.

If you have any comments, please feel free to leave them here. If you would like to engage us to help your organisation organise and automate, fill out the contact form.

Happy approving.

Read Next Read Next

---