What Is a Swimlane?

Swimlanes are an organizational tool used to help improve the efficiency of complex processes. In essence, swimlanes allow a process that could be described as overwhelming and too cumbersome to understand to be broken down into different “lanes,” each with its own set of tasks and activities.

At its simplest, a swimlane can help an individual or a team quickly organize a project and understand the different tasks that need to be completed within it. They become particularly important when working on highly technical projects, or when multiple people are working on the same project at different stages. Understanding the process can be difficult when multiple tasks need to be performed at once, or if there are multiple external teams that need to be involved in the completion of the process.

In this way, the swimlane becomes an important tool to help all members of the team to better understand the steps and processes of a project.

Examples of a Swimlane

When working on a complex project, a swimlane can help streamline the process and provide clarity on what needs to be done and how much emphasis should be put on each task. For example, let’s take a look at how a swimlane could be used in an online store project.

The swimlane could be organized with a row for the customer onboarding process, one for product selection, one for checkout, and another for payment processing. Each row could be broken down further into individual tasks, for example, the customer onboarding row could include steps like account creation, verifying contact details, and adding payment information.

Using a swimlane can also help during the process of troubleshooting, if something goes wrong in the initial stages it’s easier to visualize the flow and identify potential issues quickly.

Conclusion

Swimlanes can be a very helpful way of visualizing complex processes and tasks. Using this tool can help team members better understand their roles and responsibilities, improve efficiency and ensure that everyone is in agreement on the tasks and goals that need to be completed. Ultimately swimlanes can be a great way for new professionals to quickly understand how their role fits into the bigger picture of a project.