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
Consider automating activities
Delegate and optimize your operations
Let products appear greener
Offer customers the possibility to choose among privacy settings
Workload-based task assignment
Allocate tasks based on individuals' incomplete workload
Constraint-based task assignment
Allocate tasks considering business process execution constraints
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