What is a Swim Lane Diagram and What is the Best Alternative?

by Craig Willis

Understanding and optimising business processes is paramount for success in the current competitive landscape. From product development to customer service, every operation relies on a series of interconnected steps. To visualise and streamline these processes, various tools and methodologies have emerged, such as the swim lane diagram. But it is just one of several forms of business process mapping that companies can implement.

As it’s been around since 1940, but was first described in 1990, it’s on the older side of the mapping styles available. It is one that has remained constant for some time, especially as we head into the digital age, more and more companies are revising and revamping their business processes and coming across old swim lane diagrams that were used in the past.

This blog post will explore what a swim lane diagram is, then delve into its drawbacks and explore powerful alternatives, including how our business process mapping software, leveraging Universal Process Notation (UPN), stands out as the ultimate solution for clear, concise, and collaborative process visualisation.

In this article, we’ll answer the following questions for you:

• What is a swim lane diagram?
• Why do teams use the swim lane diagram?
• How do teams currently use the swim lane diagram?
• What are the drawbacks of the swim lane diagram?
• Alternatives to swim lane diagrams
• How to choose the right alternative
• UPN and Liberty Spark – The ultimate alternative to swim lane diagrams

What is a swim lane diagram?

At its core, a swim lane diagram is a type of flowchart that visually separates different participants or phases in a process. Imagine a swimming pool with clearly marked lanes. Each lane is dedicated to a single swimmer, ensuring they have their own space to move without colliding with others. A swim lane diagram operates on a similar principle, but instead of swimmers, it organises tasks and responsibilities within a business process.

These “swim lanes” can represent departments, roles, individuals, or even different stages of a project. Within each lane, the steps of the process are laid out sequentially, often using standard flowchart symbols, such as rectangles for processes, diamonds for decisions, and arrows to indicate the flow.

This visual segregation immediately clears who is responsible for what action at each stage of a process, helping to identify handoffs, potential bottlenecks, and areas for improvement.

Why do teams use the swim lane diagram?

Their main purpose, beyond ensuring everyone knows who is responsible for what part of the process, is to find what parts of the process are being delayed or affected by their current capabilities. Swim lane diagrams are results-oriented, with the optimisation of business processes as the final goal.

The swim lane diagram is most effective when companies have multiple departments collaborating on the same process to divide responsibilities. So, if a team is responsible for landscaping, the building team knows they should be in touch with them at specific parts of the process to ensure everything is going well, and it would be reflected in the chart.

Having all this information spread out on the map encourages cooperation and communication between team members of different departments throughout the process. It’s a great way to avoid miscommunication – in theory.

How do teams currently use the swim lane diagram?

Currently, swim lane diagrams are used for specific, similar processes across various teams or departments, such as product development, marketing and sales, or supply chain management logistics.

How to set up a swim lane process map

Step 1 – Identifying those involved in the process and the diagram to follow

By identifying everyone involved in the process, whether they are individuals, teams, or departments, businesses can determine the number of lanes their diagram will have. The optimal number of lanes involved in a single process should be between four and twelve.

Step 2: Establishing the starting point for the process

It can be a customer making an order, a decision from upper management, or a monthly task that needs to be completed. You just need to know where to start, as that is the lane from which you then develop the rest of the map.

Step 3: Completing the diagram based on the current process

All processes should ideally be chronological, and you can add them to the different lanes with arrows.

However, this is typically not the case. There will be considerable overlap between the tasks that different departments undertake simultaneously throughout the process. You need to make sure that you are correctly labelling and adding the steps at the right time, and this can turn out to be more challenging than expected to visualise.

Step 4: Search for places where the process can be optimised

The final step is to analyse and find where you can optimise your existing process. Where are the places where you can cut back on time or cost to save your company both time and money? Sometimes, you might find out that you have too few processes or actions in place, which leads to lower productivity and losses.

What are the drawbacks of the swim lane diagram?

While a swim lane diagram can be useful, there are some drawbacks.

A limit to the number of roles you can represent in a process

There is simply a lack of space on the page for them to be comprehensive enough. This makes it difficult to include responsibilities in a matrix such as RACI. If they are included, the visual focus of the diagram shifts to the roles rather than the process flow.

Complexity and clutter

Due to the difficulty of assigning roles in swim lane diagrams, activities will be duplicated when multiple roles work on the same activities. This makes the entire process look more complicated than it actually is. This makes it difficult for anyone reading it, which often results in people oversimplifying the process to make it understandable, but this leaves key components out.

Plus, when handovers of processes span multiple lanes, the process becomes confusing. If we add to this the issues with demonstrating the roles in the process, and the fact that multiple roles may work on the same activity, the issue is compounded. And with the lack of handovers, there is also a lack of value distinction. Why is this process being done? What does the company gain from it?

Limited scope for improvement analysis and applicability

While the swim lane diagram can cover one process in its entirety, it does not lend itself well to working in this way if you want to take a big-picture approach or even zoom in on a specific process. Identifying bottlenecks is one thing, but deeply analysing the root causes, simulating alternative scenarios, or tracking improvements over time is often beyond the inherent capabilities of a basic swim lane diagram.

Ultimately, these diagrams serve as the business’s operations manual. If there is any concern or issue with understanding and following along, either due to the passage of time or different interpretations of how something should be done, this can pose a big problem. You need everyone to be on the same page about each specific process and how it aligns with your most current company goals and mission. Swim lane diagrams are often not dynamic enough for this.

Alternatives to swim lane diagrams

Given the limitations of swim lane diagrams, particularly for complex and evolving business processes, various alternative methodologies and notations have emerged. Each offers a different approach to process visualisation and management:

• Value Stream Mapping (VSM): Primarily employed in manufacturing and product development, VSM identifies and visualises the material and information flow essential for delivering a product or service to the customer. Its core objective is to optimise the entire value stream by highlighting value-adding steps and identifying waste. While not a universal substitute for all process mapping methods, VSM excels at pinpointing inefficiencies.
• Data Flow Diagrams (DFD): These diagrams focus on the flow of data within a system rather than the operational steps. They show how data is input, processed, stored, and output, and are particularly useful for understanding information systems.
• Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN): This is a widely adopted standard for business process modelling. BPMN offers a rich set of symbols and constructs to represent highly complex processes, including events, activities, gateways, and pools (similar to swim lanes). However, its richness can also make it very complex for casual users to learn, implement and understand.
• Universal Process Notation (UPN): Unlike some of the more technical or industry-specific alternatives, UPN (which we’ll delve into further) is designed for simplicity, clarity, and universal understanding. Its focus is on “What happens? Why? Who? When? Where? How?” to ensure anyone can quickly grasp the process.

How to choose the right alternative

Selecting the optimal process mapping alternative depends on several factors specific to your organisation and the nature of the processes you need to document:

1. Complexity of processes

A basic flowchart or a simplified swim lane might suffice for simple, sequential processes. However, for highly intricate, interdependent processes with numerous exceptions and decision points, a more robust notation like BPMN or UPN becomes essential.

2. Audience and purpose

Businesses need to answer two questions: ‘Who will be using these diagrams?’ and ‘What will they use them mainly for?’

3. Level of detail required

Do you need to capture every minute detail of a process, including system interactions and data transformations? Or is a high-level overview sufficient for identifying responsibilities and major steps?

4. Integration with other tools

Consider whether the chosen notation or tool needs to integrate with other systems, such as project management software or automation platforms.

5. Ease of use and learning curve

How quickly can your team learn and adopt the new methodology? A steep learning curve can hinder adoption and limit the benefits that can be achieved.

6. Scalability and maintenance

As your organisation grows and processes evolve, will the chosen alternative scale effectively? How easily can diagrams be updated and managed over time?

UPN and Liberty Spark – The ultimate alternative to swim lane diagrams

Recognising the challenges and limitations of traditional process mapping methods, we developed our business process mapping software – Liberty Spark, specifically to address these needs, offering Universal Process Notation (UPN) as its core.

How Spark and UPN make process mapping clear

Liberty Spark structures processes linearly, starting with a clear trigger and moving through each activity to its output or handover. This ensures every step is captured, making it easy for anyone to follow the flow, regardless of department. Spark allows for deep detail without sacrificing clarity, with the Role Manager that clearly defines responsibilities, and the ability to create smaller, nested subprocesses.

Remember how we mentioned you cannot look at the details too closely with swim lane diagrams? Well, you can with Spark. This avoids miscommunications, and your team always knows what each part of the map means.

You have a process repository you can check in with at any time. This also allows you to standardise processes throughout your entire company, ensuring that everyone is doing what they should be doing, the way you intended, because there is no way they can get it wrong. When you want to evaluate and analyse what can be done better or improved, you can constantly examine your current process and recalibrate as necessary for the optimal result.

A twenty-first-century alternative to the swim lane diagram

Mapping out business processes is a necessity for any organisation that wants to be successful. Without understanding how their business operates, they are likely to lose track of what is happening when, resulting in time and money losses that cannot be recovered.

Swim lane diagrams were designed in the last century to visually map out these processes, to help companies see where they can make improvements. The lack of uniformity could cause more trouble than they are worth.

In the twenty-first century, with UPN, it is far easier to get everyone in the same company on board with the current processes, avoiding miscommunication and misunderstandings when it comes to implementing changes.

Liberty Spark uses UPN for this exact reason. Get in touch with our team to find out more.