How we improve the readability of cross-functional flowcharts by getting rid of swimlanes

Swimlanes are not necessarily the best option in term in readability. There is another alternative. See how we handle cross-functional flowchart in textografo.

I remember when I was a consultant doing AS IS — i.e. formalizing the current process — and TO BE — design of the targeted process — for a client. We had this huge flowcharts with various actors and something like 15 swimlanes. It was looking a bit like this:

Cross-functional flowchart with swimlanes

Well…a bit difficult to read, right?

So we thought at textografo that it could be a good opportunity to innovate. If you didn’t read it yet, you may want to have a look to our previous article:My Secret Potion for Innovation.

The key question here is what’s the purpose of a cross-functional flowchart? What do you want to achieve with this type of diagram? I believe that you want to identify who’s doing what. What are the responsibilities of different organizational units or systems in your process flow.

Swimlanes can lead to a messy flowchart, difficult to read as we can see in the previous example. Is there a way to improve that? I’m sure you know the answer! 🙂

At textografo, we have decided to indicate for each shape who’s responsible of the underlying activity by positioning the symbol of the actor directly on the shape as follows:

Cross-functional flowchart without swimlane in textografo — textografo.com

A tooltip is display on mouse over the symbol so if you don’t remember what’s the meaning of the two letter, you can alway check it (maybe that’s something that we should improve by the way by showing directly the full name of the actor in the legend as we do when exporting the diagram in PNG or PDF format).

Cross-functional flowchart exported in PNG format — textografo.com

And should you want to focus on a particular actor, you can click on the corresponding symbol to highlight the actions under its responsibility.

Highlighting an actor in a cross-functional flowchart — textografo.com

There is PROs and CONs of both solutions as I summarize below but I believe that what we call the “Inline Actors” solution provides a seamless reading experience.

Pros and Cons of Inline Actors Vs. Swimlane — textografo.com

I believe that some people will like it and other not. Feel free to give your point of view.