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Quickly and easily a produce summary plan with 2 levels of swimlanes

The Auto Layout functionality in SummaryPro has been significantly enhanced to speed up the production of your summary Plan on a Page (POAP). With a simple button click, you can now layout your plan to display as:

  • A simple waterfall based on either start date or the ID number or
  • A complex multi-swimlane layout using up to two levels of swimlane.

Some examples or POAPs produced using this new functionality in a few minutes are shown below.

A high-level view suitable for a board presentation; uses the waterfall option (no swimlanes) and some edits to bring some items into the same line:

A high level view suitable for a board presentation

A programme presentation using two layers of swimlane and the "minimise rows" option:

A programme view for the programme board

A workstream summary using the waterfall and swimlanes options:

A workstream summary useful for the team

Auto Layout can also set the timescale for your POAP so that nothing is missed and decide on the optimal size of the bars so that everything fits. The taskbar size optimisation feature is also available without using Auto Layout.

It also fills in the name of the tasks; however, as always, you are free to edit these so that you are not tied to the names in your plan.

See it in action in this video:

To try out this new time-saving functionality, you can either use the free 10-day trial or, if you are an existing user, download the latest version from the downloads section.

Miles Goodchild

Miles Goodchild has been a Program and Programme Planner, PMO lead and Project Manger since 1998.  He enjoys using MS Office, especially Project, Excel and Visio to make life easier and simpler.  In the course of this he created SummaryPro.  In this blog he shares some of the tips and techniques he has learnt over the years in the hope that they will be useful to you.