2007 Vol. 4 The Quarterly Newsletter of the PMI Central Indiana Chapter November 30

Microsoft Services
Creating Swim Lane Diagrams with Microsoft Project
Dr. Ed Hanna
Dr. Edward Hanna is a Sr. Enterprise Project Management Consultant with Microsoft Consulting Services. He has over 20 years of experience in project/program management and strategic management roles in a wide range of industries. His consulting work involves assisting Fortune 500 clients and government organizations with the deployment of Microsoft's Enterprise Project Management solution, Project Server 2007. Dr. Hanna resides in Southern California and he holds the PMP certification.
Creating Swim Lane Diagrams in Microsoft Project - Another Nugget from Dr. Ed

 

In this installment Dr. Ed Hanna shows us an innovative way to use MS Project Network Diagrams to put your schedule data into Swim Lane Diagrams.

First, you can time-phase the Network Diagram. Choose pulldown menu Format->Layout. Under Box Layout/Arrangement, choose "Top Down by Day". (Caution-if you are printing the diagram on a plotter: The diagram becomes very long.)

 

Here is the time-phased diagram. As you can see, all the tasks which start on January 1 are aligned in the January 1 column. And so on for other days of the year. Sure, you are not impressed yet, keep reading.

Now let's define "zones" (i.e. Swim Lanes) on the network diagram. Below is an example that uses Total Slack to define the swim lanes. (Note that the critical path bubbles to the top of this display.)

Getting a bit fancier, you can swim lane by Total Slack (yellow bars) and then by Duration (grey bars). This allows you to pinpoint the tasks on the critical path which are making the greatest contribution to the total project duration. In this example, there are one or more critical path tasks (off the display to the right) that have a 15 day duration! These tasks should be reviewed with an eye to shortening their duration.

Here is another variation of the swim lane technique. This one uses a custom field (i.e. Responsible Organization) and uses that field to create the swim lanes. This view is very effective for getting each organization to understand their project responsibilities and the dependencies with the work of other organizations.

So how did I do it?

To create the swim lane effect on the Network Diagram, go to pulldown menu Project->Group By->More Groups, click on New and define a new grouping.

Click "New. . . "

Choose your desired grouping (Swim Lanes)

Notice, also, that I gave the grouping a meaningful name, so I can find it and use it later; and I checked "Show in menu," so it will show up in the "Group by," menu.

That's it! This is a great, quick, way to create Swim Lane diagrams to analyze and display your schedule data.