u/Educational-Detail13

We mapped our delivery process and counted 7 distinct handoff points between a merged PR and something live in production. Those 7 are: QA sign-off, release branch cut, staging deploy, stakeholder review, change approval, prod deploy and smoke test. Each one owned by a different person or function.
The average time a change spends waiting at a handoff was longer than the time it spent in active work in any of the stages. The code is done in 2 days, production in 11 days.
We've cut a few of the obvious ones but keep hitting resistance in the approval stages, mostly compliance and risk concerns that while legitimate feel disproportionate to the actual risk level.
How to compress the approval layer without messing up the compliance coverage behind it?