Consider to deepen or broaden the skills of resources
Reijers, H., & Liman Mansar, S. (2005). Best practices in business process redesign: an overview and qualitative evaluation of successful redesign heuristics. Omega, 33(4)
Resources may be turned from specialists into generalists or the other way round. A specialist resource can be trained for other qualifications; a generalist may be assigned to the same type of work for a longer period of time, so that his other qualifications become obsolete. When the redesign of a new process is considered, application of the pattern comes down to considering the specialist-generalist ratio of new hires.
A specialist builds up routine more quickly and may have a more profound knowledge than a generalist. As a result he or she works quicker and delivers higher quality. On the other hand, the availability of generalists adds more flexibility to the process and can lead to a better utilization of resources. Depending on the degree of specialism or generalism, either type of resource may be more costly.
Note that this heuristic differs from the Triage concept in the sense that the focus is not on the division of tasks.
Foundational free Patterns
Let workers perform as many steps as possible for single cases
Reduce the number of contacts with customers and third parties
Order knock-outs by least effort and highest termination probability first.
Minimize numerical involvement
Too many cooks spoil the broth
Delegate and optimize your operations
Consider whether it is eco-friendly to let humans work over machines
Let customers interact with your organization whenever they want to.
Offer customers the possibility to choose among privacy settings
Distribute tasks by interdepartmental interactions to enable or restrict involvement
Consider the division of a general activity into two or more alternative activities