Sequential Approval Governance

Sequential approval is slower than parallel and preferable where later approvers need to see earlier decisions — a finance approval that depends on legal's amendments, a clinical sign-off that depends on a safety review. Its governance problem is time: each stage adds delay, and delay creates pressure for bypasses, which are then granted informally and become permanent. The useful controls are therefore about what happens at the stage boundaries: what a delay triggers, who may reorder, and whether skipping a stage leaves a mark.

Approval state in Centralpoint is a property of the record, so the order followed, the stages completed and any deviation are visible in the document's own history rather than inferred from timestamps in a separate system. Escalation on a stalled stage is a workflow event with a named owner, which addresses the delay without requiring an informal bypass.