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
Assign a responsible individual for handling each case type
Form cross-department teams for end-to-end case handling.
Establish standardized interfaces
Consider a standardized interface with customers and partners
Consider the division of a general activity into two or more alternative activities
Start implementing actions that can offset or counterbalance the environmental effects generated by business processes that cannot be changed.
Preference-based task assignment
Let people do what they love to do
Reassign tasks along the organisational hierarchy
Experience-based task assignment
Delegate task according to experience: execution frequency, case involvement, interactions
Allocate task based on past feedback or quality metrics