With any design principle, it’s a guideline, not a rule. Design principles must be balanced and aligned to customer needs. Building a house is a great example of balancing design principles against needs. If you want a side entry garage, for example (so the neighbors can’t easily see your disastrous clutter) you likely need a corner lot. But if your design principles tell you to avoid corner lots due to traffic and resale value, then you have a conflict of principles. Same with these.

For the purpose of these principles, let’s loosely define workflow as steps taken in a presumably transactional process. My lean towards transactional, information-based processes is strong in these, but I think they are generic enough to be applied to any workflow. Indeed, I have applied some Lean Six Sigma, which are methodologies rooted in manufacturing.

Workflow Design Principles

• Workflow should be progressed as far as possible by the same person before handing off to another associate, to automation, or to the customer (minimizes hand-offs and waiting time)
• A task should minimize the number of systems the associate must use
• A task should minimize switching back and forth between systems
• A task should minimize the number of people required to touch it
• A task should minimize manual computation or lookup steps (e.g. use of automatic calculations)
• A task should minimize user judgement calls (e.g. use of decision tools)
• Job roles/responsibilities and organizations should not be defined by the system, but rather by internal/external customer needs

How to apply these? One approach would be to write them on a whiteboard as you work through designing a process and refer to them continually. Also, once you have a completed process, review this list and then refer back to your process to see how well you adhered to them. Again, with any design principles, you will need to consider your constraints and every one of them won’t be achieved fully. By thinking about the ideal state we can start building a project backlog for future efforts.

I’d love your feedback, if anything, to add to the list!