Swim Lane Diagrams

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Use Swim Lane Diagrams to plot the connections between processes, departments and teams.

When you're thinking about your organization, have you ever said to yourself that the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing?

Chances are you have! Despite all the efforts we make to streamline business operations and flatten structures, there are still a great many activities that involve more than one department or team.

This means connections, communications and hand-offs between different sets of people. And these create the risk of processing gaps, inefficiencies and duplications, which can impair performance or increase costs.

However, by having a formal method for identifying and integrating processes between parts of your organization, you can ensure that all the "meeting points" between departments are well designed and managed.

In this article we explain one such method for doing this: "Swim Lane Diagrams," also known as "Rummler-Brache Diagrams."...