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
Eliminate unnecessary activities
Buffer external information and subscribe to updates
Let workers perform as many steps as possible for single cases
Assign a responsible individual for handling each case type
Move activities to more appropriate places
First-contact problem resolution
Establish a one-contact resolution for customer issues
Expertise-based task assignment
Match tasks to experts' specialized skills for efficiency
Preference-based task assignment
Let people do what they love to do
Allocate task based on collaborative experience: handover time, interactions, diversity