Swim-lane Overview
The objectives of business process swim-lanes are to develop standardized business processes, ensuring appropriate linkages (often across multiple divisions or business units within an organization), and agree accountabilities.
What are the benefits of Swim-lanes?
The key benefit of this technique is to provide ‘repeatable processes’ for capability maturity and set process baselines that can be continuously improved through lessons learned.
A documented and agreed business process swim-lane can then inform the development of templates, procedures, guidance and roles.
Swim-lanes could be used for programme / project linkages, status reporting and critical path dependencies, risk management activities and change control activities.
How do we create and develop a Swim-lane?
When developing business process swim-lanes:
The key stakeholders of the process should be identified.
A basic process should be developed as a starting point.
A working group of representatives of each of the stakeholders should be established to
agree the process objectives, confirm their role in the process and refine the process to
integrate it into the organization’s overall processes.
Once agreed, this information can then be implemented via P3RM community channels such as intranet sites, project management procedures and governance strategies.
Example. Business process swim-lane