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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

Appoint case managers

Assign a responsible individual for handling each case type

Work in customer teams

Form cross-department teams for end-to-end case handling.

Deploy extra resources

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

Fail Early

Order knock-outs by least effort and highest termination probability first.

Resequence activities

Move activities to more appropriate places

Offer location flexibility

Let customers interact with the company wherever they want to

Offer temporal flexibility

Let customers interact with your organization whenever they want to.

Generalize your process

Explore whether a process can easily be used for additional products or services

Department-based assignment

Distribute tasks by interdepartmental interactions to enable or restrict involvement

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