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
Form cross-department teams for end-to-end case handling.
If capacity is insufficient, consider increasing the available number of resources
Minimize numerical involvement
Too many cooks spoil the broth
Consider to deepen or broaden the skills of resources
Collect similar work items and work in batches
Replace underlying resources with eco-friendly alternatives
Automate for environmental impact
Implement automation in a sustainable way
Preference-based task assignment
Let people do what they love to do
Workload-based task assignment
Allocate tasks based on individuals' incomplete workload