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
Form cross-department teams for end-to-end case handling.
Empower workers for more decision-making authority
Start implementing actions that can offset or counterbalance the environmental effects generated by business processes that cannot be changed.
Let customers interact with the company wherever they want to
Offer customers the possibility to serve themselves
First-contact problem resolution
Establish a one-contact resolution for customer issues
Assign tasks based on resources' roles in the organisation