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
Eliminate unnecessary activities
Establish a case-based mindset
Remove batch-processing and periodic activities from your business process
Form cross-department teams for end-to-end case handling.
If capacity is insufficient, consider increasing the available number of resources
Offer customers the possibility to choose among privacy settings
Explore whether a process can easily be used for additional products or services
Reassign tasks along the organisational hierarchy
Delegate tasks according to resource cost