If capacity is insufficient, consider increasing the available number of resources
Allocate more people to a task in a process for strategic reasons, such as speeding up the process or reacting to trends
Reijers, H., & Liman Mansar, S. (2005). Best practices in business process redesign: an overview and qualitative evaluation of successful redesign heuristics. Omega, 33(4)
This straightforward heuristic speaks for itself. Note the contrast of this heuristic with the numerical involvement pattern.
When launching a new product, increase the number of customer service agents available to handle customer inquiries and support requests to ensure timely and efficient service and enhance the customer experience.
For increased resource assignment, details related to expertise, preference, role, workload, productivity, the collaboration of resources, and constraints in process execution need to be known. Based on the needs of the process, additional resources will be matched and allocated to the process.
The obvious effect of extra resources is that there is more capacity for handling cases, in this way reducing queue time. It may also help to implement a more flexible assignment policy. Of course, hiring or buying extra resources has its cost.
Foundational free Patterns
Establish a case-based mindset
Remove batch-processing and periodic activities from your business process
Reduce the number of contacts with customers and third parties
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.
Consider whether activities may be executed in parallel
Consider to deepen or broaden the skills of resources
Start implementing actions that can offset or counterbalance the environmental effects generated by business processes that cannot be changed.
Offer customers the possibility to serve themselves
Experience-based task assignment
Delegate task according to experience: execution frequency, case involvement, interactions
Minimize numerical involvement
Too many cooks spoil the broth
Empower workers for more decision-making authority
Reassign tasks along the organisational hierarchy
Assign a responsible individual for handling each case type