Leading DevOps

Manual deployment approvals often begin as a reasonable response to risk. Over time, they become permanent fixtures, even when they add little protection. A person clicks a button, but rarely has enough context to independently validate the change. The approval delays delivery while creating the appearance of control. Leaders should ask a harder question: what evidence would allow us to remove this step? Replace permission with evidence Approval gates are most useful when judgment is genuinely required. They are less useful when reviewers simply confirm that automated checks passed or that a ticket contains the expected fields. Those conditions should be enforced by the delivery system. Build pipelines can verify test results, security policies, artifact provenance, change windows, and deployment readiness more consistently than a hurried reviewer. The objective is not to eliminate accountability. It is to make accountability explicit and repeatable. Define an approval remo...