How to nest swimlanes in a Cross-Functional Flowchart Visio 2013

Question

It looks like there were some workarounds way back in Visio 2007 for such a thing, but I have not been able to find any way to either tweak the existing Cross-Functional Flowchart template, or hijack another template, into creating a swimlane diagram that supports nested swimlane headers in Visio 2013.

For example, let's say a swimlane exists for every process in some multi-process workflow. I want to group multiple processes/swimlanes because, for example, they may be more tightly interrelated than the rest of the processes/swimlanes in a diagram.

Here is a diagram from a google search that shows nested swimlane headers on the left:

Answer 1

5 year old thread but still high on Google so gonna bump this with a trick that works well in Visio 2013 and later (inc 365):

• create your diagram
• shift it all to the right by the width of the swimlane headers
• duplicate the tab, delete everything except the swimlane headers
• copy paste the headings into the original tab to the left of the diagram
• position so it lines up perfectly
• use the leftmost headers as group labels, deleting/merging as required

Answer 2

This can be accomplished a little easier if vertical swimlanes work for you.

In visio 2019, drag and drop your first few lanes together onto the chart. Then drag & drop a new one but don't let it touch, like this:

Once the last one is on the canvas you can slowly drag it together so you have this:

The last problem is the 'Phase' bar, which can be removed by going to the 'CROSS-FUNCTIONAL FLOWCHART' tab an unselecting 'Show Seperators'. Final result:

Answer 3

I found a way more simple but not really perfect:

But this is not perfect because when you try to wider the last siwmlane it will overlap other swimlane.

Because they are two separate swimlanes.

Answer 4

You could cheat by having a second chart simply over the top of one of the underlying lanes but that would be a pain if you need to change it.

But why not simply have 2 charts positioned one above the other with a small gap between them. Indeed, this might well be a clearer way to present the diagram.