Visio - Creating process maps with swim lanes

Visio is a terrific tool for creating process maps.


I particularly like the cross-functional flowchart which allows you to organize tasks by who is performing them in a process map.

Open Visio and go to:File-> New and select Template "Cross-Functional Flowchart (US units)"

A pop-up will come up asking if you want horizontal swim lanes or vertical.  I prefer horizontal.

This produces a 2 or 3 lane chart:

One thing to be aware of is that there is a new section added to the top ribbon bar in Visio called "Cross-Functional Flowchart" that provides specific functionality for this chart type.

This gives you the ability to add additional swimlanes and to divide up your swimlanes with seperators.  

Seperators allow you to break up the swimlanes according to the phase of your flowchart, it makes it easier to group activities according to a timeframe.  As a result, the cross-functional flowchart now shows which organizations have responsibilities at which point on a project.   

If you're new to visio, take the time to learn what each shape represents.  Start/End, Process, Document, Decision, etc.. Use the first link below to learn the shapes.

Links

• A list of the symbols in the Basic Flow Chart in Visio
• Next, start using containers to make the information more presentable.  Swimlanes are one way, containers are another.  Here are some links to learn more containers:
• Information on how to group your shapes so that they make more sense to viewers
• Additional write-up on why you should use containers
• Microsoft's write-up on Containers, Callouts, and Lists
• Here's a link to the Visio blog http://blogs.office.com/b/visio/