The stakeholder whose sign-off you need has missed three workshops and does not answer email. How do you handle it?

Silence is a message, and it has several meanings

The third missed workshop is where inexperienced analysts escalate, and escalating without a diagnosis converts a solvable problem into a permanent one. A stakeholder who has been complained about attends the next session and contributes nothing useful for the rest of the project.

Work out which of the plausible explanations applies, because the remedy differs completely. They may simply be overloaded, running an operational function where anything not on fire loses, in which case the answer is to make your request smaller and to go to them rather than the reverse. They may not know this is their job: plenty of nominated stakeholders were named in a governance document they never read, and nobody in their reporting line has told them it matters. They may have delegated it in their own mind to someone who does attend, which is fine and needs confirming. They may be unconvinced by the project and expressing it through absence, which is the most common form of disagreement in large organisations and the hardest to read. Or they may not be the decision owner at all, in which case months of chasing them was always going to fail.

Finding out costs one conversation, and preferably not by email. Ten minutes in person, or a phone call, framed around what they need rather than what you need: I have not had your input on the payments changes, and I want to check whether this is something you want to be across at all, or whether it should sit with someone else.

Confirm they are actually the approver

This is worth doing early because it is cheap and it is right more often than people expect. Governance documents are written at project start by people guessing at the organisation chart, and by month four the named approver may have moved role, may never have had the authority, or may be one of three people who all think one of the others owns it.

The test is not who is named but who bears the consequence. If the process being changed reports to a different director, and the person you are chasing merely consumes its output, they will never sign, because signing exposes them to something they do not control. Say the finding plainly when you have it: the sign-off sits with operations rather than finance, and I would like to move it formally rather than keep asking someone who cannot give it. That correction is a contribution, not an admission.

Make the ask answerable in two minutes

A workshop invitation asks for ninety minutes of undivided attention on your timetable, which is the most expensive thing you can request and the easiest to decline. Almost everything you need can be reformulated into something answerable from a phone between meetings.

What you sent	What to send instead
A workshop invitation for a 90-minute requirements session	"Two questions, each yes or no, by Thursday. Reply on this email."
A 40-page document for review	"Three decisions are on pages 8, 11 and 22. Nothing else needs your attention."
"Please confirm you are happy with the attached"	"We are proceeding on the basis that disputed invoices are excluded. Tell me if that is wrong."

The third row is the important one, because it inverts the effort. A request for confirmation requires them to act; a statement of intent requires them to act only if you are wrong. Busy people answer the second and ignore the first, and the shift costs you nothing in rigour as long as the statement is specific, dated and recorded.

The other adjustment is to go where they already are. If they attend an operations meeting every Tuesday, ask their assistant for five minutes at the end of it. Turning up at their meeting rather than inviting them to yours changes the response rate more than any wording.

Proceed on a recorded assumption

Waiting is the failure that looks like professionalism. Every week you hold the analysis for a signature, the delay accrues quietly and is attributed to you at the retrospective, because the person who did not reply has no visible cost attached to their silence.

So keep moving on a documented assumption. Written properly it has five parts: what you have assumed, the reason, who is affected if it is wrong, the date by which a different answer can still be accommodated cheaply, and who is being asked. Send it to them and copy the person who chairs the governance forum, not as a threat but because it belongs in the record.

For example: we are proceeding on the basis that branch managers approve their own write-offs up to £500 and anything above goes to the regional manager, because that is the current delegated authority document. This affects about 40 approvals a month. If it is wrong, we can change it at no cost until 12 August; after that the approval routing is built and changing it is roughly three days of rework. Sanjay, can you confirm or correct by the 12th?

That message is not aggressive and it accomplishes three things at once. It puts a date on the decision, it prices being wrong, and it makes the silence itself a decision that somebody has now made. The figures in it are illustrative; what matters is that a number is present, because a deadline without a consequence gets ignored and a deadline with three days of rework attached does not.

Escalate the risk, not the person

If it still does not move, escalate in a form that describes exposure rather than behaviour. What fails is any version that characterises them: unresponsive, disengaged, has missed three sessions. Every one of those invites their manager to defend them, and you have started an argument about a person instead of a project.

What works is the same assumption note with the consequence and the date, raised as an open risk at the governance forum: requirement 14 has no confirmation from the accountable owner, we are proceeding on a stated assumption, and the cost of a late correction after 12 August is three days plus a change to the test pack. No adjectives, no history, and no request for anyone to be chased. Nine times out of ten a chair reading that will handle it themselves, and the stakeholder is never told that you complained, because you did not.

What politeness costs by month four

The failure a candidate cannot see is that the missing sign-off is rarely the real damage. Its absence means the requirements in that area have never been challenged by the one person who understands the operational consequences, so the whole area is built on your interpretation. It will be technically correct and operationally wrong, and it surfaces at UAT, when that stakeholder finally engages because their own team is now affected.

Which is why the sensible response to persistent silence is not only to record assumptions but to find a substitute source of challenge: their deputy, the team leader who does the work, the trainer, the person who handles the escalations. Any of them will find the same gaps a director would, and none of them has a diary problem. Get the requirement stress-tested by somebody, then let the formal sign-off follow. A signature with no scrutiny behind it protects the project from blame and not from failure, and knowing the difference is what the question is really asking.

Diagnose the silence, shrink the ask, then keep moving on a dated assumption with a priced consequence. And find someone who will genuinely challenge the requirement, because the absent signature matters far less than the missing scrutiny behind it.