We study the possibility for a global unitary applied on an arbitrary number of qubits to be decomposed in a sequential unitary procedure, where an ancillary system is allowed to interact only once with each qubit. We prove that sequential unitary decompositions are in general impossible for genuine entangling operations, even with an infinite-dimensional ancilla, being the controlled-NOT gate a paradigmatic example. Nevertheless, we find particular nontrivial operations in quantum information that can be performed in a sequential unitary manner, as is the case of quantum error correction and quantum cloning.