Sunday, May 26, 2013

This is a PERT chart with swim lanes as rows and development stages acting as umbrella like column headings. Events progress from the left to the right.

  • The top lane contains customer interaction groups. This includes: the customer, the sales team, the business management organization and the systems engineers.
  • The middle lane has Product Development. This includes: design engineers (EE, ME, CE, and Magnetics) and technicians, drafting and development vendors.
  • The third lane has Manufacturing functions.  This includes: Manufacturing (engineering/test/process/new product introduction), purchasing and production vendors.


Beyond the expected functions of helping one: understand the process, produce a realistic schedule, monitor progress, identify critical paths, and improve the process, the swim lanes show product development tasks in a way that:

  1. Helps promote timely communication between functionally or geographically separated groups,
  2. Reveals dependancies in a way that helps team members tailor the timing and the content of their work, and 
  3. Associates the foundation of accomplishment with a correctly functioning network, or fabric, of people.


This work was done in 1986 with MacProject on a 512K Mac