Signing off

Tom Breur

6 November 2016

Sign-off. I hear this word a lot in IT, and even to this day and age, it gives me the creeps. What is worse, I know business stakeholders resent it even more. So why do we do this? Why do IT departments feel the need to request a “sign-off”? In a legal situation where contracts with third party vendors have been agreed, I can see that “signing-off” signifies that the agreed upon performance has been delivered. But why in the corporate world, with internal stakeholders? I can’t get my head around it.

The way sign-offs are usually handled among peers in the same company, is that a business owner, sponsor, budget holder, formally approves of what has been delivered. It also implies that any additional requests that arrive later, should be treated, and budgeted, as extra. The way that usually works is that end-users stumble upon a shortcoming in functionality. For business stakeholders this mostly feels like a hidden defect, and because they have “signed off” and now need to pay extra for it.

Paying extra for additional development is fine. After all, you’re running a business. The part that stings, is that a customer (Product Owner, budget holder, etc.) is asked to approve a product before being able to fully put it to the test. That often feels unfair and unreasonable. And since the sign-off transfers responsibility for correctness, it turns the relationship sour since the customer has had so much less time to “play” with it, and get a fair (!) chance to discover if everything is working as intended. Regardless of how many tests have “passed”, if the product doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do, those tests are irrelevant. The product is broken.

So next time you have a discussion with a stakeholder, I urge you to think about what is a fair and equitable timeline for your customer to become familiar with the product you just built, or call that a product increment if you’re working in an Agile environment. Does your request for sign-off allow him a reasonable amount of time? Is that how he feels about it, too? The struggles and dragging feet often indicate the converse. And if that is how the sign-off process looks, then you don’t do anybody a favor by enticing your customer to sign-off: you might well wind up spending more time fixing the relationship, than fixing the product.