It's been a topic of conversation we have had more than once around the office the last few days as to the merits of swimlanes at different stages of the workflow design process. A popular design element for business process management, workflow, and flow chart graphical design swimlanes are a graphical representation of responsibilities or categories of work typically displayed horizontally across the workspace. For example in a process workflow for a software enhancement request you might have swim lanes for support, product team, development, and quality/testing. Then as an activity, event, or gateway is created in the process flow it can be located in the proper lane to help organize the process. In theory this sounds like an ideal situation it would cleanly segregate elements in the workflow for clear assignment responsibilities, business teams can assess their requirements at a glance, and it should keep elements organized for the process designer.

However in practice swimlanes can also generate their fair share of problems.  First using swimlanes means that elements that typically could be displayed close together on the chart could possibly be moved an un-intuitively long way apart to adhere to this practice. Second elements on the flowchart that involve members or decisions from multiple departments can become pretty tricky requiring the bounding region to span each of those participating department swimlanes.  And if you have conflicting element designs each requiring different swimlanes to be adjacent then you have to start rethinking your layout and process flow.

Swimlanes are an ideal conceptual design tool allowing process flow developers to categorize and organize thoughts however graphical design elements should always be helpful and never hinder productivity. Whether you use swimlanes or not the concept of organizing your design elements by categories is an excellent starting point for any process design.  Those categories could be the stages of the process, the business divisions involved, or by design elements required to complete the process.