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
Consider automating activities
Assign a responsible individual for handling each case type
Minimize numerical involvement
Too many cooks spoil the broth
Move activities to more appropriate places
Offer a green alternative with the same outcome, utilizing different steps, resources, or partners, while retaining the previous existing process
Offer customers the possibility to choose among privacy settings
Reassign tasks along the organisational hierarchy
Experience-based task assignment
Delegate task according to experience: execution frequency, case involvement, interactions
Distribute tasks by interdepartmental interactions to enable or restrict involvement