Microsoft Visio 2010 : Tips for Creating Process and Flowchart Diagrams (part 2)

Managing Swimlanes and Phases in Cross-functional Flowcharts

Cross-functional flowcharts provide a useful variation on the age-old flowchart by letting you categorize steps in lanes and phases. They have some user-interface enhancements that make life easier but might throw off your Visio intuition a little bit.

Adding Lanes and Phases

You can add swimlanes to a diagram in several ways. You can drag Swimlane masters from the stencil, click Insert, Swimlane on the Cross-functional Flowchart contextual Ribbon tab, or click the blue insertion arrows that appear when you pause the mouse pointer over either end of a swimlane, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3. Swimlanes are list items, so inserting and reordering them are a snap. Resizing lanes and phases is simply a matter of mousing over a division until the parallel-bars-and-arrows cursor appears.

A swimlane is a container, so flowchart shapes inside a lane move with it when you reposition it. The Title shape is a container, too. However, it is specially designed to contain a list of swimlanes.

You add phases by dragging the Separator master or by clicking Insert, Separator on the CFF tab. Phases are not list items, so they are more difficult to reorder. If you make them wider or narrower, shapes that come after will shift forward or backward automatically, which saves the need to manually adjust shapes.

Resizing Lanes and Phases

Unlike most Visio shapes, you don’t have to select lanes or phases to resize them. Instead of pulling on selection handles, you can resize them similar to the way you resize rows and columns in Excel. Pause the mouse pointer over any division until you see the reposition break cursor, which appears as two parallel bars and two arrows. Figure 8.3 is a composite which shows three examples.

When you add a separator to create a phase, Visio divides the available space at the point you drop the shape. When you widen a phase, however, everything after the phase shifts, too. This often causes the flowchart to spill over onto a new page. If you want to keep to one page, you have to go to the end and make the last phase narrower to compensate. Not hard, but potentially annoying.

Contextual Ribbon Tab

The Cross-functional Flowchart tab has some neat functionality that you should explore. There’s a style gallery for quickly changing the overall appearance of the chart. You can reverse the direction of flow or transpose the whole diagram between the horizontal and the vertical. You can save space by turning off the title bar, and you set text for each lane so that it is right-side-up and easier to read.

Numbering Shapes

If you like to have your process steps numbered, automated help is hiding in the wings. The Number Shapes add-on has myriad options to help you get your numbering just right.

You find the add-on by going to View, Macros, Add-ons, Visio Extras, Number Shapes. The add-on presents a single screen with a General and Advanced tab, both full of useful options.

You can number your shapes automatically or manually click on them in the order you want. You can set the step interval, define a prefix, opt to continue numbering new shapes added to the diagram, number shapes only on specific layers, and choose whether to add the numbering before or after the existing shape text.

Validating Diagrams

If your wallet is feeling empty and you are the proud owner of Visio Premium, you have yet another bit of powerful technology at your disposal: the ability to validate diagrams for correctness and consistency.

Figure 4 shows a simple flowchart that has a few mistakes. The Process tab’s Check Diagram button is expanded to reveal that you are validating the diagram using the Flowchart rules set.

Figure 4. This basic flowchart has a few defects. Visio 2010 Premium knows what they are!

Visio 2010 Premium comes with three rule sets, which are loaded with the corresponding templates: Flowchart Rule Set, BPMN, and SharePoint Workflow.

Custom rule sets can be built and imported into documents. They don’t even have to be process-diagram specific. Visio validation is still in its infancy, but huge potential exists here for creating valuable Visio-based solutions.

Business Process Diagrams (BPMN) and SharePoint Workflows

If you have the Premium edition of Visio 2010, be advised that you have two advanced flowcharting templates at your disposal. The BPMN Diagram and Microsoft SharePoint Workflow templates both appear under the Flowchart category in the Choose a Template page.

BPMN Diagrams

The BPMN Diagram template supports the Business Process Modeling Notation 1.2 standard. The shapes that come with this template not only have the proper BPMN look, but also contain appropriate Shape Data fields. They also have custom right-click menu items for fine-tuning shapes to more specialized purposes. All this, along with the BPMN rule validation discussed in the preceding section, and Visio 2010 Premium goes a long way toward helping you create BPMN-compliant diagrams.

SharePoint Workflows

With the SharePoint Workflow template, you can diagram a SharePoint workflow in Visio. Then, using the Export button in the SharePoint Workflow group on the Process tab, you can export your work to a VWI (Visio Workflow Interchange format) file. This VWI file can be imported and understood by SharePoint Designer 2010, where you can further edit the workflow and finally run it in SharePoint.