The person who can authorise it is not the person you are speaking to

Doing the work and approving the work are separate jobs

In most organisations the person who prepares a decision is not the person who signs it off. That separation is not bureaucratic decoration. It exists because a single individual who could both create a transaction and approve it would be able to complete anything alone, and every control framework in existence treats that as the thing to design out.

So the work is split. One role assembles the case, checks the evidence and recommends an outcome; another reviews the recommendation and commits it. From the customer’s point of view this is invisible until the second role turns out to be somewhere else, at which point a matter that is substantively finished sits still for days.

Authority is graded by value and by risk

Approval rights are almost always tiered by amount or by consequence. Small routine items are approved within the team, larger ones need a manager, and a small number of categories need somebody further up again. The thresholds are set once and reviewed rarely, which is why they sometimes feel oddly low for the sums involved today.

The tiers explain a pattern that otherwise looks arbitrary: two requests that seem alike take wildly different times because one fell just under a threshold and one just over. It also explains why splitting a request is sometimes suggested and sometimes firmly refused. Deliberately arranging work to stay under an approval limit is exactly the behaviour the limits exist to catch, and most policies say so directly.

Scarcity is the point, which makes availability the problem

The number of people holding a given authority is kept small on purpose, because the value of an approval control is roughly inversely proportional to how many people hold it. A permission held by everybody is not a control at all.

The predictable side effect is a bottleneck. A handful of people carry approval duties on top of their own workload, and those duties compete with meetings, leave and everything else. When one of them is away for a fortnight, every case needing their level of sign-off waits, and none of the waiting is visible to anyone outside.

Deputising exists, and it is narrower than it sounds

Most organisations do have arrangements for absence: a named deputy, an acting role, or a delegation recorded formally for a defined period. These work, but they are typically specific rather than general. A deputy may hold the authority up to a lower threshold, or for some categories and not others, or only where the substantive holder recorded the delegation before leaving.

That is why “can somebody else sign it?” gets a hedged answer. The honest response is often that somebody else can sign some of it, and whether your case falls inside that narrower scope has to be checked rather than guessed. Delegations are also documented, which means using one carries a small administrative cost that a busy deputy may reasonably schedule rather than absorb immediately.

Approvals get batched, and batching adds a day

People holding approval duties rarely handle each item as it arrives. They work through the queue in a session, often at a fixed point in the day or week, because switching between reviewing approvals and doing their own work is expensive and because reviewing a batch together makes inconsistencies visible.

Batching is efficient and it adds latency. An item submitted an hour after the session waits for the next one. It is also why an approval can appear to happen instantly on some days and take three days on others without anything having changed about the case itself.

What is worth asking when something is waiting for sign-off

Ask what level of authority the case needs and whether it has actually reached that queue, because a case waiting to be prepared and a case waiting to be approved are entirely different delays with different remedies. Ask when the approval session runs, since it is frequently a known and stated rhythm.

And ask whether a deputy arrangement covers this category, rather than whether somebody else can help, which invites a general answer to a specific question. None of this makes an approver appear. But it distinguishes a case that is progressing normally from one that is sitting in a queue nobody is currently emptying, and only the second of those is worth escalating.