Swimlane for month

[Oshadhi Vindhyani]

Hi all 

I'm quite new to Jira and I'm exploring my options. So, it would be very helpful for me to receive your valuable advice or any insights you might have for someone starting out as a Jira admin.

Access: Jira user admin 
Product: Jira cloud 
Plan: Standard

1. Can swimlane creation be automated to specific boards on Jira company-managed projects? 
2. Is it possible to manage one project with 2 different board settings and share those board settings all across the Jira instance? 

3. Is it a good idea or a good practice to add swimlanes for each month? ( Project time duration always will be more than a year)
4. Is it possible to pull specific swimlane data to a report? 


Here is what I'm trying to achieve 
Background: I have over 10 projects at the moment over time projects will add up. I have decided I'll go with Kanban considering the flexibility and simplicity of the management style. In a each one of the projects has two different teams SEO and web development team. Once the project is developed & tested web team hands it over to the SEO team. The SEO team has monthly recurring tasks for every single project. I will need to generate the following reports A. productivity reports regarding team members and B. Project reports considering the impact of 2 teams on overall project success.  

I'm sorry about the lengthy post. Thank you for your time. And Merry Christmas to those who celebrate. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Hi Oshadi,

No, each board has to be configured by the person creating the board, and that includes the swimlane definitions

Yes, you can have projects with many boards configured differently, but there's no way to share board configurations, you have to copy them.  (Note that only applies to Company-managed projects.  Team-managed projects only have a single board, less configuration options, and still no sharing)

It can be a very good practice to do swimlanes by month.  The "best practice" for swimlanes is to "do what works best for your team", and some teams can and will work very well with swimlanes by month.  As you suggest, it probably isn't great for teams with a constant flow of incoming stuff and won't really end (i.e a support project), or a team that has a project expected to only last a few weeks, but a project of 1-5 years (from development to end-of-support), yes, it could work really well.

Swimlanes are driven by filters.  For reporting, just replicate the filter the swimlane uses. If for example, a swimlane is "priority in (critical, high)" then use that in the reporting.  You will need to consider the rest of the board filter too, but that is usually "project = X" so not too complex to bring in.

[Oshadhi Vindhyani]

Thank you so much for this clarification. I'd appreciate it.