Mapping organisational roles (swimlanes)

Learn how you work with swimlanes to connect your activities with the roles that are responsible for doing them.

Søren Pommer avatar
Written by Søren Pommer
Updated over a week ago

What are swimlanes?

Swimlanes are used in process flow diagrams and flowcharts to visually distinguish job sharing and the responsibilities of a business process. Swimlanes in Gluu are arranged horizontally.

Using swimlanes in Gluu

Each process in Gluu will contain swimlanes. They represent the roles included in the process. Each swimlane should contain the activities, decisions, and events the role is responsible for. Once you have opened a process canvas in edit mode, the first thing you should do is to establish which roles are involved.

Adding roles to processes - or swimlanes

You can add/edit swimlanes when you are in your process. Click on the green & grey squares in the menu to select a swimlane (role) and drag it to your diagram. Then double click on the swimlane to choose your role. You will then be able to see some options.

There are two ways to add a new swimlane:

  1. Select a role from your common library of roles or

  2. Add a new role (You need rights to 'Manage roles' to add new roles)

Great! Your first role has now been added. To include more roles simply select the swimlane icon from the toolbar and drag it to the canvas, or click the plus sign to create a new one.

Tags: Process shapes, process diagrams, process mapping, process improvement, process blueprint, swimlane diagram.

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