Glossary
Swimlane diagram
What is a swimlane diagram?
A swimlane diagram is a process map divided into lanes, one for each person, team or system, so you can see who does each step and where the work passes from one to another.
Also called: Swim lane diagram
Why it matters
Work often waits or loops back where it crosses from one lane to another. Lanes make those handoffs visible. BPMN, the standard notation for business process diagrams, uses lanes to group the work.
Example
Drawn with one lane per app, a weekly revenue review zigzags between Gmail, Slack, Salesforce, Google Sheets and Google Slides, which shows how much of the work is carried between tools by hand.