Delegating Authority in Business Processes: Who Makes Decisions When You’re Away?

A colleague is on vacation. So who makes the decision?

The request arrived on Tuesday. The person responsible for handling it did not return from vacation until the twentieth. The deadline, of course, did not go on vacation with her.

In practice, this kind of situation is rarely seen as a process problem. It is treated as a minor issue that will somehow be resolved. Someone will call, someone will say, “Leave it, I’ll take care of it,” and someone will ask the manager to sign on behalf of the absent colleague.

And it usually does get resolved. The problem is that it gets resolved outside the process, not within it. That detail is precisely what separates an organization that works from one that works only because the right people happened to be available.

What Happens to a Business Process When the Person Responsible Is Absent?

Every process includes a step that cannot be handled by just anyone. An invoice above a certain amount must be approved by a specific person. A second-instance case must be signed by a designated role. A contract can only be moved forward by the person responsible for it.

This is not a bureaucratic complication. It is the whole point. If everyone could do everything, there would be no process—only a sequence of steps.

For the same reason, however, every such step carries its own vulnerability: if that person is absent, the process comes to a standstill. This creates what is actually one of the most costly problems in any administration, yet one that rarely has a name. Let us call it an authority gap: the case exists, the documentation is complete, the deadline is approaching, but no one is formally authorized to move it forward.

Organizations usually do not measure how much this gap costs them because it never appears in a report. Instead, it appears in the sentence: “We are waiting for Amra to return.”

What Does the Delegation of Rights and Authority Mean in a Business Process?

It is worth pausing here because two different things are often confused in these discussions.

Tasks are easy to delegate. Someone else can prepare a document, gather the necessary documentation, review an invoice, or call the client. In most cases, nothing special is required for that.

What does not transfer automatically is the authority to complete the step. The authority to approve, sign, move something forward, or close it. That authority is not an attribute of a person but of a role, which is why it must be explicitly assigned.

The difference between these two things is the difference between “my colleague helped me” and “my colleague made the decision on my behalf.” The first is an everyday occurrence. The second must leave an audit trail.

How to Properly Delegate Rights and Authority to Another Person

Whether it is a public institution or a private company, proper delegation of authority always answers the same three questions.

Who.
Authority is delegated to a named individual—not to a department and not to “someone on the team.” If it is not clear exactly who has taken over, then nothing has truly been delegated; responsibility has simply been blurred.

What.
Delegation has a defined scope. Entrusting someone with managing a case is not the same as authorizing them to make a decision on it. By their very nature, some actions should not be delegated at all. An organization that has not considered this in advance will have to consider it later, usually under unpleasant circumstances.

Until when.
This is the part most often overlooked in practice. Authority is delegated for a specific reason and should end when that reason no longer applies. Authorization without an end date does not expire on its own—it is simply forgotten, and a year later someone may still have permissions they no longer need.

Who, what, and until when. Paper-based systems require the same answers, only more slowly and with a greater chance of something being lost along the way.

What Are the Risks of Informal Delegation of Authority?

When a system does not provide a defined way to delegate authority, people invent their own. Always with the best intentions and always in a hurry.

A password is shared, and the step is completed under someone else’s name. An email is sent saying, “This is fine by me—go ahead,” leaving the decision in an inbox rather than in the case file. A manager is asked to sign in place of a colleague, even though they were not involved in handling the case.

None of these actions seems dramatic at the time. They all become serious later, when someone asks a simple question: Who approved this, and on what basis?

That is when it becomes clear that three things have been lost. The audit trail has been lost because the system records the wrong person. The boundary has been lost because no one defined how far the substitute was authorized to go. And the end date has been lost because an arrangement that lasts “until I return” has no specific date.

How Does Delegation of Authority Work in OWIS?

In OWIS, delegation of authority is part of the user profile, not an administrative intervention. In their settings, users open the authority delegation option, select the period during which they will be absent, choose the user who will replace them, and confirm. That is the entire process.

From that moment on, cases awaiting their action are also visible to the person replacing them, within the limits permitted by that person’s user group. The system does not create new permissions—it temporarily extends existing ones to another person.

There is another option for unplanned absences. If a user was unable to set up the delegation themselves, an administrator can do it on their behalf. Illness and emergencies are not exceptions that disrupt the system, but scenarios the system is designed to handle.

Most importantly, the delegation expires automatically. There is no need to “remember to revoke access” because the end date is defined in advance. Returning from vacation does not require any access cleanup.

How to Prepare for Delegating Authority Before Going on Vacation

If you want your processes to continue running while you are away, the questions are always the same:

• Which steps in my cases specifically require my action rather than that of anyone else on the team?

• Which of my colleagues has the knowledge and position required to take them over?

• Do they need all my permissions or only some of them?

• From which date until which date?

• Is there anything that should wait until I return—and does the person replacing me know that?

Five questions, two minutes. Less time than it takes to handle a single phone call from the office while you are on vacation.

Why Is Delegation of Authority Important for Business Process Continuity?

Delegation of authority is not a sign of distrust in the process, nor is it an admission that someone is replaceable. It is a sign that the process is more enduring than the individual managing it at that particular moment.

An organization in which authority is delegated properly, transparently, and for a limited period does not perform better because it exercises stricter control. It performs better because it no longer depends on who happens to be in the office that day.