Avoid shared responsibilities for tasks by people from different functional units
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 idea behind this redesign pattern is that tasks for which different departments share responsibility are more likely to be a source of neglect and conflict.
Reducing the overlap in responsibilities should lead to a better quality of task execution. A higher responsiveness to available work items may be developed also, so that clients are served quicker. On the other hand, reducing the effective number of resources that is available for a work item may have a negative effect on its throughput time, as more queuing may occur.
Foundational free Patterns
Buffer external information and subscribe to updates
Let workers perform as many steps as possible for single cases
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
Design business processes for typical cases and isolate exceptional cases from the normal flow
Consider the division of a general activity into two or more alternative activities
Collect similar work items and work in batches
Workload-based task assignment
Allocate tasks based on individuals' incomplete workload
Reassign tasks along the organisational hierarchy