If you have worked on any elearning project then you know that revisions can really hinder your productivity.

In fact, if you are not careful you could end up in a constant revision cycle that makes it impossible to complete your project on time and on budget.

The only way to combat constant revisions is to have a formal approval process in place.

Without approvals then your content can never be officially finished.

But with an approval process-flow, you can remain productive and keep your project chugging along. It also helps to keep things on budget, which every organization can appreciated.

What Makes a Good Approval Process?

The key to a good approval chain is to have multiple phases of approvals.

At a minimum you should have three and at a maximum five. Anything more than this and it gets a little difficult to track down an approval when you need it.

While there are many different ways to determine the hierarchy of your approvals, in general it will look something like:

1. Peer review (informal approval)
2. Subject matter expert(s)
3. Instructional design team manager
4. Director level or equivalent (usually the boss of the subject matter experts, but not always)
5. Overall project lead

Again, you could have more in this hierarchy. You could even have multiple people at each level. I remember one project where we had two people at each phase. One worked for the client and the other was part of our consulting team.

The point of the approval process, albeit tedious sometimes, is to protect you.

As you create your content and it is approved you can begin to focus on other parts of the course or even other courses.

Once approval has been given then no changes can be made without going through formal change request procedures – but that’s a topic for another day 🙂 .