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
Assign a responsible individual for handling each case type
Design business processes for typical cases and isolate exceptional cases from the normal flow
Elevate physical constraints by applying new technology
Delegate and optimize your operations
Consider to deepen or broaden the skills of resources
Automate for environmental impact
Implement automation in a sustainable way
Expertise-based task assignment
Match tasks to experts' specialized skills for efficiency
Preference-based task assignment
Let people do what they love to do
Workload-based task assignment
Allocate tasks based on individuals' incomplete workload