---
title: Redesign Heuristics (2005) vs. Prescriptive Process Monitoring Interventions (2022) — side-by-side mapping
type: synthesis
tags: [bpr, redesign, heuristics, prescriptive-process-monitoring, prpm, devils-quadrangle, mapping]
sources:
  - "[[sources/2005-reijers-limanmansar-best-practices-bpr]]"
  - "[[sources/2022-kubrak-prescriptive-ppm-slr]]"
  - "[[sources/2018-dumas-fundamentals-of-bpm]]"
  - "[[sources/2014-groger-prescriptive-analytics-bpo]]"
created: 2026-05-11
updated: 2026-05-11
---

# Redesign heuristics vs. PrPM interventions — side-by-side mapping

This page maps the **29 design-time BPR heuristics** of [[sources/2005-reijers-limanmansar-best-practices-bpr|Reijers & Liman Mansar (2005)]] onto the **runtime prescriptive interventions** characterised by the PrPM SLR ([[sources/2022-kubrak-prescriptive-ppm-slr|Kubrak et al. 2022]]). The aim is to surface where the two literatures address the *same* class of intervention and where they do not — a question Kubrak's SLR conspicuously declines to answer (see also [[syntheses/bpm-phases-and-bpr-legacy#interlude--does-prpm-repeat-or-learn-from-bpr|bpm-phases-and-bpr-legacy §Interlude]] for the narrative version).

## Why the mapping matters

- The 2005 catalogue is **design-time, expert-driven, qualitative**, scoped to the *technical* challenge of redesign. Trade-offs are evaluated against the [[concepts/devils-quadrangle|devil's quadrangle]] (cost / time / quality / flexibility).
- The 2022 SLR characterises **runtime, data-driven, per-case** prescriptive methods. Trade-offs are not evaluated against the devil's quadrangle; most methods optimise a single KPI.
- The two literatures share an intervention vocabulary (resource (re)allocation, task re-ordering, next-task recommendation, escalation) but Kubrak does not cite Reijers; the design-time predecessor is invisible to the PrPM corpus.
- Mapping them exposes **which heuristics have a runtime analogue, which do not, and which PrPM intervention types are missing a design-time grounding**.

## PrPM intervention vocabulary (Kubrak §RQ2)

Kubrak collapses the 37-method corpus's interventions to two process perspectives — **control-flow** (next task / next sequence) and **resource** (allocation, reassignment) — both **hand-specified by analysts**. Five policy forms exist (similarity-based, rule-based, exceeding-metric-limits, maximum-metric-improvement, probability-of-negative-outcome-above-threshold), characterised orthogonally as continuous vs. discrete and as optimizing vs. guiding.

## The mapping table

Reading: ✓✓ = direct runtime analogue exists in PrPM; ✓ = partial / adjacent analogue; — = no PrPM analogue in Kubrak's corpus.

| # | Reijers 2005 heuristic | Element | Devil's-quadrangle dimensions | PrPM analogue (Kubrak 2022) | Mapping |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Control relocation | Customers | quality, cost | — (no method moves controls to the customer) | — |
| 2 | Contact reduction | Customers | time, quality, cost | — | — |
| 3 | Integration | Customers | time, flexibility, cost | — | — |
| 4 | Order types | Operation | time, quality, cost, flexibility | Routing recommendation: "for this case, switch to variant *X*" — closest match is next-task / next-sequence guidance | ✓ |
| 5 | Task elimination | Operation | time, flexibility, cost | Skip-this-task recommendation under deadline pressure (degenerate next-task) | ✓ |
| 6 | Order-based work | Operation | time, cost | — (batching is a design-time choice; PrPM acts per-case) | — |
| 7 | Triage | Operation | quality, time, cost, flexibility | Continuous routing of cases to specialist queues based on predicted complexity | ✓✓ |
| 8 | Task composition | Operation | time, quality, cost, flexibility | — (composition is a design-time choice) | — |
| 9 | Resequencing | Behaviour | time, cost | Next-task recommendation = runtime resequencing of the remaining suffix | ✓✓ |
| 10 | Parallelism | Behaviour | time, cost, flexibility, quality | — (introducing parallelism mid-case is rare in PrPM) | — |
| 11 | Knock-out | Behaviour | time, cost | Maximum-metric-improvement policy that reorders remaining checks; alarm-based stop-this-case is closest | ✓ |
| 12 | Exception | Behaviour | time, quality, flexibility | Probability-of-negative-outcome-above-threshold policy that diverts cases to exception flow | ✓ |
| 13 | Order assignment | Org. structure | time, quality, flexibility | Resource-allocation methods that bind a case to one resource end-to-end | ✓ |
| 14 | Flexible assignment | Org. structure | queue time, quality, flexibility | Continuous resource (re)allocation per step (Conforti et al.; de Leoni et al.) | ✓✓ |
| 15 | Centralization | Org. structure | flexibility, time, cost | — (a structural choice, not a per-case action) | — |
| 16 | Split responsibilities | Org. structure | time, quality, flexibility | — | — |
| 17 | Customer teams | Org. structure | cost, time, flexibility, quality | — | — |
| 18 | Numerical involvement | Org. structure | time, cost, quality | — | — |
| 19 | Case manager | Org. structure | quality, satisfaction, cost | — | — |
| 20 | Extra resources | Org. population | time, flexibility, cost | "Hire / borrow capacity" alarm is implicit in some maximum-metric-improvement methods; Sindhgatta et al. (2016) prescribes adding resources to bottleneck step | ✓ |
| 21 | Specialist–generalist | Org. population | time, flexibility | Resource-recommendation methods using *experience* features (Arias et al.; Yang et al.) effectively prescribe specialist over generalist per step | ✓✓ |
| 22 | Empower | Org. population | time, quality, cost | — (PrPM does not prescribe organisational roles) | — |
| 23 | Control addition | Org. population | time, quality, cost | Probability-above-threshold alarms that add a check step on suspicious cases | ✓ |
| 24 | Buffering | Information | time, cost | — | — |
| 25 | Task automation | Technology | time, quality, flexibility | — (a design-time decision; the *act* of automating is not a prescription) | — |
| 26 | Integral BP technology | Technology | quality, cost, time | — | — |
| 27 | Trusted party | External | cost, time | — | — |
| 28 | Outsourcing | External | cost, quality | — | — |
| 29 | Interfacing | External | cost, quality, time | — | — |

## Quantitative summary of the mapping

- **Direct runtime analogues (✓✓):** 4 of 29 — Triage, Resequencing, Flexible assignment, Specialist–generalist. All four sit in *Operation*, *Behaviour*, or *Organization* and concern *how a single case is routed or resourced now*.
- **Partial / adjacent analogues (✓):** 6 of 29 — Order types, Task elimination, Knock-out, Exception, Order assignment, Extra resources, Control addition. Mostly behaviour-layer alarms or resource bindings.
- **No PrPM analogue (—):** 19 of 29. Categorically: every **Customers**, **Information**, **Technology**, and **External Environment** heuristic, and most **Org. structure** heuristics. These are design-time *structural* choices, not per-case actions.

**Inverse view — what PrPM does that the 2005 catalogue does not name:**

- **Alarm-based prescription** triggered by predicted probability of negative outcome (Teinemaa et al. 2018; Fahrenkrog-Petersen et al. 2022). No 2005 heuristic prescribes "act at runtime when probability of failure exceeds θ" — the entire alarm primitive is post-2005.
- **Causality-aware policies** using CATE / uplift modelling (Bozorgi et al. 2021; Shoush & Dumas 2021). The 2005 catalogue evaluates trade-offs but never estimates them counterfactually.
- **Continuous resource reallocation** at every step (Schonenberg et al. 2008; Barba et al. 2011) — the catalogue assumes assignment is a design-time choice.

## What the comparison reveals

1. **PrPM concentrates on a slim slice of the 2005 catalogue.** Only ~10 of 29 heuristics have a runtime analogue, and they all cluster in three framework elements: *Operation*, *Behaviour*, *Organization*. The remaining 19 — covering customers, information, technology, external environment, and structural org. choices — remain design-time and are not yet addressed at runtime.
2. **The "missing 19" are structural.** Heuristics like *centralisation*, *customer teams*, *outsourcing*, *integral BP technology*, *buffering* cannot meaningfully be applied to *one running case*. They reshape the process, not its instances. PrPM is, by construction, an instance-level discipline.
3. **PrPM lacks a devil's-quadrangle scaffold.** No PrPM method in Kubrak's corpus evaluates its prescription against the four-dimensional trade-off. Most optimise a single temporal KPI; quality, flexibility, and cost are mentioned single-digit times in the 37-method corpus. This is a regression relative to 2005.
4. **PrPM adds two primitives 2005 could not express.** Alarm-based triggering on predicted-probability thresholds, and causal estimation of intervention effects (CATE / uplift). These are first appearances in the design-vs-runtime arc.
5. **The two literatures should converge.** Heuristics 7, 9, 14, 21 in the 2005 catalogue *already* have ML-backed runtime methods. The honest research agenda — implicit in Kubrak's Gap #2 ("no method discovers interventions from logs") — is to extend PrPM's intervention discovery so that it can *learn* runtime variants of the 19 structural heuristics, with explicit trade-off labelling per the devil's quadrangle.

## Where to act on this mapping

- **For PrPM researchers:** Heuristics 1–3, 6, 8, 10, 15–19, 22, 24–29 are runtime-unexplored. Several admit instance-level reinterpretations (e.g., *Numerical involvement* → a runtime alarm that flags cases where the number of distinct resources exceeds a threshold and reassigns to consolidate). The catalogue offers 19 candidate research directions.
- **For redesign practitioners:** A PrPM dashboard is *not* a substitute for the Reijers–Liman Mansar catalogue. It addresses ~10 of 29 levers; the rest remain a design-time conversation tied to scope, structure, and external relationships — exactly the levers the [[sources/2014-sharp-using-scope-models|TRAC scope model]] frames first.
- **For agentic-BPM thinkers:** The Dumas et al. (2026) call for an *"agentic extension of the Reijers & Liman-Mansar redesign heuristics"* (see [[syntheses/bpm-phases-and-bpr-legacy]]) is the integration target: a single catalogue indexed by both design-time framework element *and* runtime intervention class, with trade-off profiles attached.

## Related

**Concepts:** [[concepts/bpr-heuristics]] · [[concepts/devils-quadrangle]] · [[concepts/prescriptive-process-monitoring]] · [[concepts/intervention-policy]] · [[concepts/bpm-lifecycle]]

**Methods:** [[methods/process-redesign-heuristics]]

**Sources:** [[sources/2005-reijers-limanmansar-best-practices-bpr]] · [[sources/2022-kubrak-prescriptive-ppm-slr]] · [[sources/2018-dumas-fundamentals-of-bpm]] · [[sources/2014-groger-prescriptive-analytics-bpo]] · [[sources/2026-dumas-agentic-bpms-pyramid]]

**Sibling syntheses:** [[syntheses/bpm-phases-and-bpr-legacy]] (narrative companion — *Interlude* on PrPM vs BPR) · [[syntheses/ppm-landscape]] (PPM/PrPM corpus map) · [[syntheses/prescriptive-process-monitoring-lineage]]