Eliminate unnecessary activities
Eliminate non-value adding practices
Reijers, H., & Liman Mansar, S. (2005). Best practices in business process redesign: an overview and qualitative evaluation of successful redesign heuristics. Omega, 33(4)
A common way of regarding a activity as unnecessary is when it adds no value from a client's point of view. Typically, control activity in a workflow do not do this; they are incorporated in the model to fix problems created or not elevated in earlier steps. Control activities can often be found back as iterations and reconciliation tasks.
The heuristic is widespread in literature, for example see Peppard and Rowland (1995), Berg and Pottjewijd (1997), and Van der Aalst and Van Hee (2002). Buzacott (1996) illustrates the quantitative effects of eliminating iterations with a simple model.
The aims of this heuristic are to increase the speed of processing and to reduce the cost of handling a case. An important drawback may be that the quality of the service deteriorates.
Foundational free Patterns
Consider automating activities
Empower workers for more decision-making authority
Avoid shared responsibilities for tasks by people from different functional units
Start implementing actions that can offset or counterbalance the environmental effects generated by business processes that cannot be changed.
Let products appear greener
First-contact problem resolution
Establish a one-contact resolution for customer issues
Performance-based task assignment
Allocate tasks based on past performance: execution time and success
Delegate tasks according to resource cost
Allocate task based on collaborative experience: handover time, interactions, diversity