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Split responsibilities

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)

Description

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.

Split task responsibilities
Split task responsibilities

Performance considerations

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.

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Foundational free Patterns

Deploy extra resources

If capacity is insufficient, consider increasing the available number of resources

Minimize numerical involvement

Too many cooks spoil the broth

Outsource activities

Delegate and optimize your operations

Parallelize activities

Consider whether activities may be executed in parallel

Specialist-generalist

Consider to deepen or broaden the skills of resources

Workload-based task assignment

Allocate tasks based on individuals' incomplete workload

Quality-based task assignment

Allocate task based on past feedback or quality metrics

Department-based assignment

Distribute tasks by interdepartmental interactions to enable or restrict involvement

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