Flow, process and networks
Swimlane diagram
Shows steps and hand-offs grouped by responsible people, teams or systems.
- Diagram
- Responsibility
- Process explanation
What it answers
Who performs each step and where are hand-offs?
- Shape
- Process steps arranged in actor lanes
- What it shows
- Ownership and hand-off complexity.
Example
The question
Who does what when a new employee joins?
Onboarding a new employee, steps by team (swimlane diagram)
Illustrative data. It belongs to no company.
When to use it
Use it when
Clarifying responsibilities in a process.
Avoid it when
Too many lanes or undefined cross-lane relationships.
How to read it
Read the lane owner before following arrows across lanes.
The data you need
- Layout
- Two linked tables or structured diagram
- Fields
- Nodes: NodeID,Label,Lane; Links: FromID,ToID,BranchLabel
- One row is
- One node or one directed process connection. What is the grain?
- Rules
- Assign every activity to a defined lane and retain valid hand-off links.
- Optional
- Shapes can also be manually authored from the same conceptual content.
- Preparation
- Validate the input grain and missing values. Assign every activity to a defined lane and retain valid hand-off links.
- Units
- Relationships and positions have no numeric unit by default. Label any counts, durations, probabilities or weights separately.
Worked example
Customer laneSubmit connects to Support laneReview. The crossing identifies a customer-to-support hand-off.
| Nodes: NodeID | Label | Lane |
|---|---|---|
| n1 | Submit | Customer |
| n2 | Review | Support |
| Links: FromID | ToID | |
| n1 | n2 |