How do I set up swimlanes?

[gabrielle_anderson]

I'm looking at the instructions to set up swimlanes, and it says to:

1. Go to your board, then select more () > Board settings.
2. Click the Swimlanes tab.

I cannot find the Board settings in the More hamburger menu:

and if I select "project settings" from the left hand menu, there's no swimlanes option:

How do I set up swimlanes?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

You are looking at docs for Company-managed projects, but you are working with a team-managed project.

Team-managed project boards don't yet have swimlanes.

[gabrielle_anderson]

I created a company-managed project, but I still didn't see the option:

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I think you're missing board administrator permission.  You'll ned to get one of the existing board admins to add you to that.

[gabrielle_anderson]

I created everything. This is a personal project. There's no one else to give me permissions. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Ok, then the other thing is that it is a Jira Work Management project, whos built-in boards do not have swimlanes.

[gabrielle_anderson]

What is a jira work management project? What type of project do I need to set up to support swimlanes?

I'm happy to set anything up, I don't have content in here already. I'm trying to test out the swim lanes. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

JWM projects are shown as "business" projects in the creation screens and the project list.

Software projects get the more configurable Scrum and Kanban boards, but you don't actually need to move to a Software project to get a board that supports swimlanes. 

You just won't see the board in the project links if you do this:

Go to "boards"

Annoyingly, the link was removed from the main menu.  You can get to it via a company-managed Software project, or by using the "my work" link in the main menu, which has a "boards" tab, with "view all boards" as a link in it)

Create a new board, Scrum or Kanban (do not use "with sample data"), and it will ask you three questions:

• Board name: Give it a good useful representative name, so other people know what it is for.
• Project: You can select any project in here, including your Business project.
• Location: This will let you put the board in any Software project, or, at the bottom of the list, "personal", which means it will appear in your "my work" section

And now you'll be able to configure swimlanes, and all the other clever stuff Software boards can do.

Be warned though - Scrum and Kanban boards are very much aligned with their respective methodologies.  If you're not wanting to do Scrum in your business project, I strongly recommend selecting the Kanban option - they're more intuitive to use for non-Kanban processes than Scrum boards (which pretty much require your team to work in sprints)

[John Funk · Accepted solution]

Hi Gabrielle,

Actually, I believe it is a Business project (Jira Work Management). But regardless, Swimlanes are still not available for those types of projects right now. You could create a second board based that you could add those to. Here is an article I recently wrote that shows you how to do that and the pitfalls.

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Agile-articles/Creating-a-Second-Agile-Board-for-Team-Managed-or-JIra-Work/ba-p/2115018

[John Funk]

 @gabrielle_anderson - This is still a Jira Work Management project , and you still have the same issue as I noted above.

Your other option is to create a Jira Software Company-managed project.

[Craig Nodwell]

You need the board admin permission to perform this activity.
You can review this post for reference to how to add a person to board admin.