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
Reduce the number of contacts with customers and third parties
Empower workers for more decision-making authority
Design business processes for typical cases and isolate exceptional cases from the normal flow
Execute tasks when the grid is powered by renewable energy
Offer customers the possibility to choose among privacy settings
Expertise-based task assignment
Match tasks to experts' specialized skills for efficiency
Reassign tasks along the organisational hierarchy
Allocate task based on collaborative experience: handover time, interactions, diversity
Distribute tasks by interdepartmental interactions to enable or restrict involvement