Consider whether activities may be executed in parallel
Reijers, H., & Liman Mansar, S. (2005). Best practices in business process redesign: an overview and qualitative evaluation of successful redesign heuristics. Omega, 33(4)
The heuristic is mentioned by Rupp and Russell (1994), Berg and Pottjewijd (1997), and Van der Aalst and Van Hee (2002). Van der Aalst (2000b) provides quantitative support for this heuristic.
The obvious effect of applying this heuristic is that the throughput time may be considerably reduced. The applicability of the heuristic in workflow redesign is large. In practical experiences we have had with analyzing existing workflows, tasks were mostly ordered sequentially without the existence of hard logical restrictions prescribing such an order.
A drawback of introducing more parallelism in a workflow that incorporates possibilities of knock-outs is that the cost of workflow execution may increase. The management of workflows with concurrent behavior can become more complex also, which may introduce errors (quality) or restrict run-time adaptations (flexibility).
Foundational free Patterns
Eliminate unnecessary activities
If capacity is insufficient, consider increasing the available number of resources
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
Let customers interact with the company wherever they want to
Reassign tasks along the organisational hierarchy
Allocate task based on past feedback or quality metrics
Distribute tasks by interdepartmental interactions to enable or restrict involvement