---
title: 'Operational Barriers'
description: 'Helps identify unnecessary approvals, unclear decisions, and work obstacles that slow people down every day.'
type: template
locale: en
canonical: 'https://yoseno.com/templates/process_friction'
---

# Operational Barriers

Helps identify unnecessary approvals, unclear decisions, and work obstacles that slow people down every day.

## Key facts

- **Categories:** 2
- **Questions:** 10
- **Who to ask:** An employee, team lead, or manager of a small team whose work depends on internal approvals, work processes, handoffs between roles, and digital tools.
- **Topic:** Processes and work formats

## When to run it

The team complains that simple tasks take too much time. People are bogged down in bureaucracy, long approvals, and inconvenient tools. You want to find specific operational barriers that prevent working faster and reduce productivity.

## What it will show

- **Approvals and decision rights:** Shows where tasks slow down because the decision owner is unclear, there are unnecessary checks, approval is delayed, or the criteria are not transparent.
- **Tools, processes, and workarounds:** Repeated entry, manual reconciliation, fragmented data, handoffs between roles, and informal ways of getting work done.

## Example questions

- In typical work tasks, it is clear to me who has the authority to make the final decision or approve the next step.
  - **What it measures:** Understand how clear the owner of the final decision or approval of the next step is in recurring work tasks.
  - **Scale endpoints:** Disagree — Agree
  - **Open-ended clarification:** In which typical tasks is it most often unclear who can make the final decision or approve the next step?
- In my usual work, I do not have to re-enter, copy, or transfer the same information between tools and documents.
  - **What it measures:** Understand how well the workflow and set of tools support a continuous flow of data without unnecessary manual transfer between tools, forms, spreadsheets, or documents.
  - **Scale endpoints:** Disagree — Agree
  - **Open-ended clarification:** Where do you most often have to re-enter or transfer the same information?
- In typical work tasks, approvals do not repeat the same check or go through unnecessary levels without a clear reason.
  - **What it measures:** Understand whether the respondent sees a clear purpose in each approval level in their workflow: who checks what, why this step is needed, and whether it repeats a check that has already been completed.
  - **Scale endpoints:** Disagree — Agree
  - **Open-ended clarification:** Please specify the part of the work where approvals most often repeat the same check or go through unnecessary levels.

## What's in the report

The report will identify bottlenecks in processes: where decision rights are distributed inefficiently, which approvals delay work, and where employees have to invent workarounds due to broken tools or confusing regulations.

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