Swimlanes

In a swimlane board, each lane represents a person or team in a process, such as a sales, accounting, or legal. Each person or team will have responsibilities and tasks which can be put in their lane. These tasks are often dependent on each other, and you can draw the relationship between them to understand how the work flows between teams.

Use swimlanes to brainstorm how to organise a new process, or to better understand your existing processes. By seeing the connections between different teams and tasks, you’ll see how your process can be made more efficient, or communication improved. Perhaps some steps are holding up others and could be done at the same time, or in a different order. Perhaps some steps turn out to be unnecessary or optional.

At Ideaflip we prefer this vertical layout where each person or team has their own column, but you can also organise things horizontally in a classic ‘swimlane’ layout (like a swimming pool).