10 questions to pressure-test your land management workflow.

Crossings and road use requests move through a lot of hands. When intake, approvals and documentation are managed across email, spreadsheets, and shared drives, teams don’t just lose time they lose control and visibility. That shows up as slower cycle times, more escalations, and more effort spent chasing updates instead of moving files forward.

Use these questions as a quick gut check to help you pinpoint where your workflow is strong, where it’s fragile under volume, and where a few targeted controls can create outsized gains in speed, governance, and recoverable value.

1. Request intake: Do all Crossings and Road Use requests come in through one intake path with standard fields (disposition, legal location, proposed activities/purpose of use, Lic/Line#, etc)?
2. Single source of truth: Is there one place everyone trusts to see real time status, next steps, and required documents without chasing updates?
3. Ownership: For every request/file, is there a clearly assigned single owner accountable end-to-end?
4. Right people, right time: Are reviews/approvals automatically routed to the correct stakeholders based on rules, not memory?
5. Workload control: When crossings/road use volume spikes, can you quickly see what’s in each person’s queue, rebalance work, and keep turnaround times predictable without adding pressure to your team?
6. Cycle time: From intake to decision/approval, how long does a typical crossings/road use request take and can you measure it by request type (standard vs complex vs rush)?
7. Audit-ready trail: Do you have a complete, consistent history of actions, approvals, conditions, and documentation for every request, stored in one place and easy to export/share when needed?
8. Rush requests (tracked + defensible): Do rush requests follow a defined workflow where urgency rationale, approvals, time stamps, and any applicable fees/cost recovery are captured by default?
9. Maintenance Consistency: Are you confident your billing process is clearly defined and defensible so that you are limiting disputes and having good data to back up maintenance invoices? How confident are you that everyone using your roads has paid correctly?
10. Portfolio visibility: Can you report on bottlenecks, workload by land agent/team, approvals time by stakeholder group, and top delay drivers without manual reporting?

If several of these landed as a “No”, it’s a signal your team is absorbing complexity through manual effort, and the process may not scale as volume increases. The good news is most of these gaps are solvable with a small set of workflow controls (standardized intake, clear ownership, structured routing, audit-ready history, and visibility into bottlenecks).

Want to know how you score? Send us your answers and we’ll return a Land Workflow Control Scorecard showing your control level, the top gaps slowing you down, and the 2–3 workflow controls that typically deliver the fastest cycle-time lift.

Most teams are surprised by which control gaps create the biggest delays.

‍