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
Let workers perform as many steps as possible for single cases
Minimize numerical involvement
Too many cooks spoil the broth
Move activities to more appropriate places
Replace underlying resources with eco-friendly alternatives
Automate for environmental impact
Implement automation in a sustainable way
Expertise-based task assignment
Match tasks to experts' specialized skills for efficiency
Assign tasks based on resources' roles in the organisation
Constraint-based task assignment
Allocate tasks considering business process execution constraints
Delegate tasks according to resource cost