¶ Templates, Swimlanes & Activities
The Workflow Builder helps you design the structure of your workflow. Activities are its building blocks: the tasks and deliverables that need to be completed. To make them structured and reusable, Planally uses three components:
- Forms: The fields an activity captures, built in the Form Builder.
- Swimlanes: Lanes that group activities (e.g. Design, Procurement, QA).
- Activity Templates: The activities themselves: a name, a swimlane, a form, and guidance.
Activity templates are then placed on roadmaps, so they're created automatically in every new project.
Your workflow's words: if your workflow calls activities something else, such as Tasks, the menu shows Task Templates.
¶ Overview
Setting up activities takes three steps:
- Create forms in the Form Builder, or add a ready-made one.
- Create swimlanes to organise activities.
- Create activity templates, each with a swimlane and a form.
¶ 1. Forms
Every activity template uses a form: the fields people fill in when they complete the activity.
- Go to Configuration → Projects → Forms.
- Click Add New Form to design one in the Form Builder.
- Or click Add Existing Form, enter a Name, and choose one of Planally's ready-made forms (such as Gate, used for gate decisions). Click Save.
The Forms list shows each form's Name, its Form type, and when it was Created and Last Updated.
¶ 2. Swimlanes
Swimlanes group activities visually, by team, discipline, or category. In Phase Gate View, each swimlane is a row.
¶ Steps
- Go to Configuration → Projects → Swimlanes.
- Click Add.
- Enter a Name (e.g. Design, Procurement, QA), an Abbreviation, and a Description.
- Set the Order in which it appears.
- Click Save.
¶ 3. Activity Templates
An activity template defines an activity once, so it can be added to roadmaps and projects the same way every time.
¶ Steps
- Go to Configuration → Projects → Activity Templates.
- Click Add. The Add Activity Template panel opens.
- Under General, fill in:
- Name: what the activity is called in projects.
- Description
- Swimlane: where it appears in Phase Gate View.
- Form: the form people fill in.
- Availability: Available to use it on roadmaps and in projects, or Unavailable to retire it.
- Under Purpose, explain what the activity is for. Add Reference Documents (guidelines, templates) if useful; they also appear in Documents.
- Click Save.
¶ What Happens Next
- Add activity templates to roadmaps so they're created automatically in new projects. See Designing Roadmaps.
- Project teams can also add activities to a project later. Set Permission Inheritance on the roadmap so these activities still get the right endorsements and approvals.
- To stop a template being used, set it to Unavailable rather than deleting it.
¶ Best Practices
- Build and preview forms first, then create the templates that use them.
- Keep activity names short and action-based (e.g. Submit Invoice, Approve Design).
- Write a clear Purpose so people know what "done" looks like.
- Use swimlanes that match how your teams are organised.
- Reuse one form across similar activities instead of building near-copies.