Swimlane Diagrams

I was doing some basic stuff while working on a process diagram for an insurance service provider project. My role in this project is a QA(Software Tester). I was documenting the business flow and i didnt have the luxury of a proper BPA(Business Process Analysis) tool like TIBCO Nimbus. While googling i figured out a concept called 'Swimlane Diagrams'. To my surprise this happened to be easy to learn. This seemed to be readily usable and i caught up with it quite easily. 

I just happened to assume that the term swimlane was coined after the various lanes in a swimming pool which guides to swim in a straight path. The exception being in the 'Swimlane diagrams' there can be interactions among the various lanes which we don't quite see in the swimming pool's lanes.

These are my initial thoughts on the 'Swimlane Diagrams' and i will be writing more on this as time permits.

A Swimlane is one of the most popular ways to describe complicated processes in a step-by-step way with multiple participants.

Swimlanes are not as complex as the BPM Process diagrams. They are not as simple as a flow chart either. The swimlanes are primarily in places where the process needs to be described along with the various participants which is not possible in a flow chart approach.

Swimlane, are also known as cross-functional flow-chart. Swimlanes are used to group sub-processes or tasks according to obligations of certain resources, roles or departments. It’s very convenient when algorithm of the process execution is divided into lanes each of which contains actions made by one of the employees.

The swimlanes gives a better visual understanding of the various process flows with-in and between the various participating parties. The participating parties can be special resource types, organization elements or actions connected to a special location. Using swimlanes, it is possible to specify the role of an executor making it easy to document responsibilities in a much better way than flowcharts.

What is BPMN?

BPMN or Business Process Model Notation, is a process diagramming language.

BPMN was developed about 10 years ago and it describes, in a picture, the steps in a business process from start to end, an essential starting point whether you are simply documenting the process, analyzing it for possible improvement, or defining business requirements for an IT solution to a process problem. 

In 2006, the Business Process Model Notation was adopted as a standard by OMG (www.omg.org).

BPMN is an open industry standard, under the auspices of the Object Management Group.  It is not owned by a particular tool or consulting company.  A wide variety of tools support it, and the meaning of the business process diagram is independent of the tool used to create it. With BPMN you don’t need to standardize on a single tool for everyone in the organization, since they all share a common process modeling language

BPMN is more popular than its contemporaries-UML, IDEF among others primarily because of ease of use and adaptability. It is more generally accepted as the standard by both the business user and IT.

To business users, a process diagram looked like a swimlane flowchart, widely used by BPM practitioners but lacking precise definition in a specification.  BPMN adopted the basic look and feel of a swimlane flowchart, and added to it the precision and expressiveness required by IT. In fact, that precision and expressiveness is sufficient to drive a process automation engine in a BPM Suite (BPMS).  The fact that the visual language used by the business to describe a proposed To-Be process is the same as the language used by developers to build that process in a BPMS has opened up a new era of business-empowered process solutions in which business and IT collaborate closely throughout a faster and more agile process improvement cycle. 

Unlike flowcharts created in a tool like Visio or Powerpoint, the meaning of each BPMN shape and symbol is quite precise – it’s defined in a specification – and in principle independent of the personal interpretation of the person who drew it.  I say “in principle” because it is possible to violate the rules of the BPMN specification, just like it is possible to write an English sentence that violates accepted rules of grammar or spelling.  Nothing drastic happens in that case, but the diagram’s effectiveness at communication is decreased.

The investment in process discovery and analysis is far more than the cost of a tool or the time required to draw the diagrams.  

It involves hundreds of man-hours of meetings, information gathering from stakeholders, workshops, and presentations to management.  The process diagram is a distillation of all that time and effort.  If it cannot be shared across the whole project team – business and IT – or to other project teams across the enterprise, now or in the future, you are throwing away much of that investment.  BPMN provides a way to share it, without requiring everyone to standardize on a single tool

For more on BPMN: http://www.bpmn.org/

BPM- Business Process Management

All businesses have processes. Let it be a loan processing bank, a credit card issuer, a super market, or a healthcare provider, all businesses follow a process. When the size of the business is small, just people and minimal software support alone can help implement the process. But as the business grows, the complexity scales up exponentially.

As the business grows, we lose sight of things. We tend to lose track of what’s happening and fetching the metrics we need becomes highly complex.

When we hand-off things between departments, we make mistakes, we tend to duplicate one another’s efforts.

This is where BPM comes to our help. BPM is a methodology that follows a set of steps that helps us to take a look the process and make it better. It also formalizes the process by defining ways we should do it specific to a business’s needs. It also gives us tools to analyse and take a look at the bottle necks, inefficiencies and streamline the ways we should do things and by that certainly improves the process.

Some popular BPM methodologies used globally are LEAN or Six Sigma. Most of the businesses do use a more generic method that suits their needs.

Apart from being a methodology, BPM is also a technology. The BPMS is a software system that enforces the process formalized by the BPM by the way of various policies. It also provides a greater visibility and generate important metrics at various levels which is very important for decision making.