Who does what when and how do they do it? An all-important question for any business.

That means you have to document your business processes and improve them as your company grows. It’s never too early to start. Whether you’re a company of one, 100, or 1000, having your business processes documented can help.

So where do you start and how do you do it?  

The Flowchart Process

When a company is small and working hard just to get processes documented, it’s normal to use a basic flowcharting process just to get things down on paper.

Start by doing a brainstorm of all the processes in your company. Think in terms of those major processes that help your company function – sales process, customer service process, payment process, collections process, fulfillment process, hiring process, payroll process, etc. Then start breaking them down by identifying the steps that must occur for the process to have a successful outcome. Once you feel you have enough information, document them.

Using flowcharts to document processes is an easy first step, and most people are familiar with them, so there’s a short learning curve. As you ramp up, they can be used as learning tools to train new employees who come on board. You could have an entire catalog of processes for your company.  

But as your company grows and expands, simple flow charts just aren’t enough. Although they do a good job at defining how things flow, they don’t show who does what, how things are handed off between departments or staff, and whether there are duplications of effort or other inefficiencies that need to be fixed.  

The Swim Lane Diagram – or Cross-Functional Process Map

That’s where the Swim Lane Diagram comes in handy. This type of flow chart shows how people or departments are interconnected and who “owns” what part of the process. Made popular in the 90s as the Rummler-Brache Method for performance improvement and also known as the Cross-functional Process Map, swim lanes have become a mainstay in the Business Process Reengineering (BPR) effort.

You might have been invited to a “swim lane meeting” and wondered what in the heck that was all about. It’s simply a meeting focused on documenting business processes in a swim lane format.

Why is it called a swim lane anyway? If you visualize a swimming pool at a swim meet where each competitor has their own roped off lane to swim in, that’s what this type of diagram looks like. Each lane identifies an individual, department, or function who has a role in the identified process. Steps of the process that are owned by that role are placed in their own swim lane.

This format makes it much easier for you to identify steps that can be changed to improve the efficiency of the process. From here, you can create a “To Be” map that reflects those changes.

One thing to keep in mind is that the swim lane doesn’t show everything, so you’ll want to dig deep to find and fix those hidden inefficiencies in the process as you move forward.