Swimlanes in Planner

Iron Contributor

Dears,
another topic asked frequently is the ability to add Swimlanes in Planner. Is this considered?
Thank YOU!

9 Replies
Hello! Can you tell us more about how you'd use Swimlanes? What would you want each lane to represent?
This depends on the Plan Joanna. We would not like it framed but rather open in the naming KANBAN style.

@Joanna Parkhurst I agree with @Konstantina Antoniadou . Planner is very interesting for our organisation, but the ability to "cut" plans into swimlanes would be a great feature. Just imagine it as a capability to visually organize your plan into "custom rows" to separate tasks (eg : you could for example keep your "to do", "in progress" and "done" columns, but categorize them into "test" and "production" swimlanes.

@Yohan30 @Joanna Parkhurst   I am interested in the Swimlanes as well.  A use case I am trying to put together is to conduct a Scrum Story Mapping session.   if you set up the Buckets as features ( Deliverables to a client)  and then apply Sprints as Swimlanes, the mapping would move the story card under the features and into the sprints.  this mapping process gives a good visual representation of when a feature can be delivered.  See the image I added 

 

 

 

I'll add to the conversation that for a small team, you sometimes need to explore different areas of a topic separately. Swimlanes would make organisation of the tasks much easier. I'm not at liberty to go into detail about what we're working with, but an example would be that our team is responsible for the design of a house. A few members will research exteriors, a few members will research interior, a few will research electrical, a few will research ventilation etc. Having those tasks all in the same bucket with no dividers makes it unpractical. The labels aren't enough.

swimlanes would be great.  ultimately I think planner needs 2 things.

1) swimlanes which is essentially the ability to not only group by on he top axis but to also group by on the left axis, this swimlanes.

2) to make the swimlanes really work well I think planner needs more custom fields besides 'bucket' and 'label'.  I think planner would be more powerful with let's say 10-15 customer fields that can be defined as text, dropdown or select etc.  if those additional fields were then made available in the group by it would make planner more robust.

@Joanna Parkhurst - This would allow for visualizing work that is being done by different people but have dependencies on each other like dev user stories moving to qa phase - in this case the top swimlane would be the dev team/developer and the bottom swim lane the qa team/tester.

 

 

I's suggest Microsoft to implement some kind of "Grid Group by" view; by having a grid view with Progress on the horizontal axis and Buckets on the vertical axis, we could use Buckets as swimlanes
Horizontal swim lanes will be hugely useful. The use cases are:
1. Broad visibility over multiple sprints
2. Improved ability to prioritize