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
Buffer external information and subscribe to updates
Let workers perform as many steps as possible for single cases
Reduce the number of contacts with customers and third parties
Minimize numerical involvement
Too many cooks spoil the broth
Offer a green alternative with the same outcome, utilizing different steps, resources, or partners, while retaining the previous existing process
Consider whether it is eco-friendly to let humans work over machines
Offer customers the possibility to choose among privacy settings
Workload-based task assignment
Allocate tasks based on individuals' incomplete workload
Delegate tasks according to resource cost