How Plan Swiftly Works
A quick guide to understanding the key concepts and getting the most out of your engineering management plans.
Project Structure
Plan Swiftly organises your work into a clear hierarchy:
Organisation
Your team or company. Each organisation can have multiple projects and invite team members with different roles.
Project
A specific engineering initiative. Projects contain versions and have team members assigned as Authors, Reviewers, or Members.
Version
A snapshot of your engineering plan. Create new versions as your approach evolves. One version can be marked as "active" for easy access.
Phases & Gates
Structure your project timeline with phases and quality checkpoints.
Phases
Major stages of your project like "Concept", "Design", "Build", and "Test". Each phase has a duration that helps calculate effort and scale visualisations proportionally.
Example phases: Requirements, Preliminary Design, Detailed Design, Manufacturing, Integration, Validation
Gates
Review or approval milestones where deliverables must reach a certain status. Gates can be tied to specific dates or positioned as a percentage through a phase.
Example gates: Design Review, Safety Assessment, Customer Approval, Release to Production
Groups & Actors
Define who's involved in your project and how they're organised.
Groups
Teams or departments involved in the project. Groups help organise actors and create swimlanes in visualisations.
Example groups: Engineering, Quality Assurance, Project Management, Customer, Suppliers
Actors
Roles or people who do the work. Each actor belongs to a group and can be assigned to activities with specific RACI responsibilities and effort levels.
Example actors: Project Director, Lead Engineer, Safety Analyst, QA Manager
Activities & Deliverables
Define the work to be done and what it produces.
Activities
Work items or tasks. Activities belong to phases, have actors assigned with RACI roles, produce deliverables, and can depend on other deliverables.
Activities can also be marked as "processes" if they're ongoing or repeating rather than one-time tasks.
Deliverables
Outputs of your project — documents, designs, artifacts, or systems. Activities produce or update deliverables, and gates define expected deliverable states.
Example deliverables: Requirements Specification, Design Report, Test Plan, Safety Case
Dependencies
Activities can depend on deliverables (the deliverable must exist before the activity can start) and produce deliverables (the activity creates or updates the deliverable). This creates a flow of work through your project that's visualised in the Roadmap view.
RACI Responsibilities
When assigning actors to activities, you specify their RACI role:
Does the work
Approves the work
Provides input
Kept up to date
You can also specify effort for each assignment — either as hours or as a percentage of the actor's time during the activity's duration.
Visualisations
Plan Swiftly generates multiple views of your plan, each tailored to different audiences:
Lifecycle
Timeline showing phases and gates, with phases scaled by duration.
RACI Matrix
Grid of actors vs activities showing responsibilities and effort.
Planning
Effort distribution across phases and actors, useful for resource planning.
Roadmap
Deliverable flow diagram showing dependencies between outputs.
Assurance
Gate-focused view showing expected deliverable states at each checkpoint.
Deliverables
Matrix of deliverables across phases showing when they're created or updated.
User Process
Actor-specific view showing their activities, responsibilities, and deliverables.
Change Impact
Analyse the ripple effect of changing a deliverable — see affected activities and actors.
Version Workflow
Versions move through a controlled workflow to ensure quality:
Authors create and edit versions, then submit for review.
Reviewers provide feedback via comments and approve versions for issue.
Members can view issued versions and their visualisations.
Run a Health Check before issuing to catch data quality issues like missing assignments, orphaned deliverables, or circular dependencies.
Ready to get started?
Create your first project and see your engineering plan come to life.