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
Combine small activities into composite activities
Let workers perform as many steps as possible for single cases
Assign a responsible individual for handling each case type
Design business processes for typical cases and isolate exceptional cases from the normal flow
Establish standardized interfaces
Consider a standardized interface with customers and partners
Consider to deepen or broaden the skills of resources
Consider whether it is eco-friendly to let humans work over machines
Delegate tasks according to resource cost
Allocate task based on collaborative experience: handover time, interactions, diversity