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
Design business processes for typical cases and isolate exceptional cases from the normal flow
Order knock-outs by least effort and highest termination probability first.
Start implementing actions that can offset or counterbalance the environmental effects generated by business processes that cannot be changed.
Let customers interact with the company wherever they want to
Explore whether a process can easily be used for additional products or services
Preference-based task assignment
Let people do what they love to do
Delegate tasks according to resource cost
Allocate task based on collaborative experience: handover time, interactions, diversity