The Ultimate Guide to Understanding Swim Lane Diagrams

What Is a Swim Lane Diagram?

Swim lane diagrams are flowcharts that show both a process from start to finish and who is responsible for each step in the process. Much like a swimming pool with established lanes for each swimmer, the diagram has horizontal or vertical lanes belonging to each actor in the process. Instead of just documenting the steps in the process, this style of diagram allows people to easily see their own responsibilities within the system and know how their role fits within other moving parts as responsibility is handed off from one party to the next. Popularized in Geary Rummler and Alan Brache's Improving Processes, a swim lane diagram (or Rummler-Brache diagram) can be extremely valuable. Some of the benefits of using this diagram include:

• Delineating responsibilities belonging to certain individuals or department
• Identifying bottlenecks, redundancies, and extraneous steps to streamline processes
• Ensuring all necessary parties are involved in a process
• Standardizing work processes and documenting them in highly sharable formats

Swim Lane Diagram Examples

Any process that involves more than one party is an excellent occasion to document the process through a swim lane diagram. Corporations, for example, can model standard sales workflow processes by showing the internal process of handling a lead. A lead may start off as the responsibility of the marketing department, where it is nurtured and marketing-qualified before being handed off to a sales representative. Once the deal closes, the lead (now a customer) is handed off to customer services. From there, it may intermittently move briefly to the marketer's lane for surveys and feedback before circling back to the sales representative for a contract renewal or product upsell.

By showing this process through a swim lane diagram, marketers know that qualifying the lead isn't the end of their interactions with the customer. Instead, they will have future interactions regarded feedback. Sales reps also can clearly see that renewals are their responsibility. Even better, they know they can turn to marketing for information regarding the customer's experiences and the likelihood of upselling.

Other examples of swim lane diagram can include:

• Onboarding a new employee, so HR representatives have a detailed breakdown of responsibilities
• Modeling changes to other swim lane diagrams to test new processes
• Internal auditing workflows
• Accounts payable processes