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
Combine small activities into composite activities
If capacity is insufficient, consider increasing the available number of resources
Consider whether activities may be executed in parallel
Avoid shared responsibilities for tasks by people from different functional units
Collect similar work items and work in batches
Start implementing actions that can offset or counterbalance the environmental effects generated by business processes that cannot be changed.
Replace underlying resources with eco-friendly alternatives
Consider whether it is eco-friendly to let humans work over machines
Expertise-based task assignment
Match tasks to experts' specialized skills for efficiency