Approver authority matrix for operations team

An operations team's approver authority matrix covers the decisions that keep agents and people working together: pausing an agent, requesting a change in its depth, approving process exceptions, handling a backlog of held items, moving reviewers between queues, and paying small redress. Each decision gets a named approver, a limit and a rule for when someone else must agree.

What does operations approve that other teams do not?

Single-process teams approve actions on cases: a refund, a claim, a payment. Operations approves actions on the system that handles the cases. When three agents feed held items into shared queues, someone must decide which queue gets reviewers today, whether a struggling agent should be paused, and whether a backlog can wait until tomorrow without harming customers.

These are management decisions, but they have the same need for clarity as case decisions. A pause that nobody was authorised to make, or a depth request raised by someone who does not own the agent, creates confusion when something goes wrong. The matrix records who may do what. It works alongside the case-level matrices, such as the approver authority matrix for the payments operations team and the approver authority matrix for the legal operations team.

How do you fill it in?

• List the operational decisions your team makes about agents and queues.
• Name the approver for each, and whether they must inform or obtain agreement from anyone.
• Set a limit where one applies: a duration, a number of items, a value.
• Record what must be written in the record when the decision is made.
• Note the certificate required, if your organisation links approval rights to certification.

The template

A worked example

A hypothetical bank's servicing operations: three agents, thirty reviewers, four team leads, an operations manager and three agent owners. Values are illustrative.

Pausing is easy and restarting is hard, by design. A team lead who sees an agent behaving oddly can pause it at once. Restart needs the owner and operations manager, once the cause is understood.

A depth change request goes from the owner, one step at a time. Operations cannot raise an agent's depth: depth is earned through certification, capped by the role's ceiling, and the lower wins. The request starts that process; it does not grant anything.

Narrowing an agent's limits temporarily, for instance during a known fraud wave, is something operations can do itself. Those actions then become refused or held under the organisation's own limits. That is different from a withheld action, which is a platform decision the organisation cannot change.

Redress for agent errors is logged with an error reference, so the owner can see each cost the agent caused and fix the brief or bound behind it. Thresholds belong in the approver rule for the operations team and, for payments, the approver rule for the payments operations team. The general concept is set out in what an authority matrix is. Team leads and managers can evidence these skills through Pryme Intelligence Academy's Operator track, whose modules include running the rhythm. Each role's skills are in AI agent skills by role.