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.