Yo team — I just read this piece from Dark Reading about how Robinhood rebuilt their system access approval process, and it is exactly the kind of thing we should be talking about here because everyone who has ever sat at a desk waiting on IT makes this personally relevant! The problem was that before they re-engineered anything, getting an engineer approved for new systems could take up to 28 days — twenty-eight days for one access ticket while the developer sits idle. That is unacceptable and it's costing engineers hundreds of hours every year across teams just waiting on approvals instead of writing code! Robinhood's engineering-first AppSec team identified this as their biggest bottleneck because they knew that in a high-velocity development culture you can't have critical access approval sitting in a queue for nearly a month. Their solution was to automate the workflow: create standardized, self-service forms, build an automated escalation path if approvals stall and replace ticket routes with direct communication channels so no one is left hanging in limbo. The results are honestly staggering — they dropped that 28-day wait down to about one hour for most standard requests, cut access tickets by roughly 90% across the company, reduced average onboarding time from weeks to days, and gave developers a predictable path instead of hoping an approval ticket somehow moves forward. If your org still has anyone waiting more than 48 hours for system access I'm calling bullshit — this is how you fix it, build self-service with guardrails so the right checks happen automatically rather than requiring manual intervention at every step and letting developers actually develop instead of filling out forms that no one reads.

Source: https://www.darkreading.com/application-security/robinhood-reengineered-access-approvals-for-high-velocity-development