#OMNIGRAFFLE SWIMLANES HOW TO#
#OMNIGRAFFLE SWIMLANES SOFTWARE#

Similar to the company goal use case, this will help you prioritise and better understand how much time is being spent on what. Distinguish Task Types Blue Cat swimlanes task types sampleĪnother great way to use Kanban swimlanes is to separate workflows by task types, for example: bugs, new features, tests, QA, and documentation. This will allow you to better assign resources based on the task requirement. If you have engineers or contributors with different skill levels, another way to organise your board is by having a designated swimlane for each level of complexity. While it's common to start by using swimlanes for each individual engineer or team member, you can have different swimlanes for teams that often collaborate with each other on various projects. One of the most common uses for Kanban swimlanes is to separate the work of specific functional areas or teams. Blue Cat swimlanes preview Distinguish Teams You’ll be able to see what each member is up to and to track their progress. If you’re using Trello swimlanes between team members, one easy way to have an overview of what’s everyone up to is to have designated swimlanes for each member. If you're looking for more specific examples of the different ways you can use Kanban swimlanes, keep reading, we break down each use case in more detail below. You should also take care to make sure that one lane doesn't contain too many similar types of tasks, as this can cause confusion and make it difficult to parse through. To be effective, swimlanes should only contain those tasks that share a specific purpose tasks that belong to different purposes should remain in their own lane. Here are some different use cases for kanban swimlanes using the Swimlanes by Blue Cat power-up. They can be used to represent various departments, areas of responsibility, workflow steps, stages of development, or any other logical separation. Swimlanes are a common feature in most Kanban boards. Regardless of how you use them, swimlanes can be leveraged to make your team more efficient by keeping related tasks grouped.īelow are some of the different ways you can use Kanban Swimlanes to categorise various tasks within your board.

There are countless use cases, and how you use your swimlanes largely depends on your unique company needs. You could have a Kanban board with swimlanes dedicated to different functions or have swimlanes separating development from testing, design from operations. They help manage projects with various teams, products/features, or initiatives. Kanban swimlanes are horizontal lines that split a Kanban board into sections.

Here’s an example with 5 different columns: Kanban method What are Kanban Swimlanes? The columns represent backlog (what work you need to do in the future), currently doing, completed, and in progress or a similar variation for instance, backlog, in production, in QA, and deployed. The most common way to set up a Kanban board is to have four primary columns, each representing a stage of your production process. Toyota Production Processĭue to the methodology’s popularity, many project management tools, including Trello, now have Kanban board functionality, allowing you to easily build out your workflows into a Kanban format. This approach helps you eliminate waste-something that’s critical when implementing lean project workflows. It’s a system for managing pull production instead of pushing parts through in batches, Kanban ensures that parts are produced only when there is demand for them by moving them down a line when they are needed. It was created by Taiichi Ohno, one of Toyota’s founders, as part of his Toyota Production System.

#OMNIGRAFFLE SWIMLANES SOFTWARE#

Kanban is a popular methodology used to visualise workflows, most commonly used for software development projects.

#OMNIGRAFFLE SWIMLANES HOW TO#

In this guide, we will help you understand what swimlanes are, how they can help you execute your projects more effectively, and how to use Kanban swimlanes the right way. At Blue Cat Reports, we are dedicated to helping you streamline your project workflows and manage your projects from start to finish of every project.

Kanban swimlanes allow you to break your tasks into logical and visual groups that will help you stay organised and effectively manage multiple initiatives, teams, and timelines in one place.

Kanban boards are nothing new, but whether you just started using them or are looking to use them more effectively for your team, we have got you covered! Kanban boards are a great way to organise your team’s work with agile methodology and implementing swimlanes on your board will allow you to visualise and prioritise your work more effectively.

Omnigraffle swimlanes