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
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
Move activities to more appropriate places
Consider to deepen or broaden the skills of resources
Consider the division of a general activity into two or more alternative activities
Assign tasks based on resources' roles in the organisation
Constraint-based task assignment
Allocate tasks considering business process execution constraints
Performance-based task assignment
Allocate tasks based on past performance: execution time and success