How to: Swimlane appears in only one column

[Nicole Zimmermann]

Hello all,

I would like to have a swim lane which only appears in one column. This column is called "Doing", and I wish the swim lanes "In Progress" and "Blocked" to be visible in ONLY this column of my Board.

How can I achieve this? 

Thank you for your help!
Nicole 

[Bill Sheboy · Accepted solution]

Hi @Nicole Zimmermann 

That structure is not supported by the built-in Jira boards.

What you describe is fairly common for more complicated Kanban boards, when process, capacity, etc. split by some aspect of the parent column.

Yet you are describing a "blocked" condition, rather than a progress step in flow.  Please consider other options to indicate blocking, such as using the "flag" with right-click, adding a label, using card colors, quick filters, etc.

Kind regards,
Bill

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Nicole Zimmermann 

A swimlane on an Agile board is a horizontal grouping of issues that spans all the vertical columns/statuses of the board. 

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/configure-swimlanes/

For instance if you set you swimlanes to Epics, then you will get a horizontal grouping for each Epic where that grouping contains the child issues of the Epic. It will show those child issues in each vertical column based on their current Status.

Given that information can you provide more details about your use case? Can you provide a mock up of what you want? Can you explain the criteria you would want to use to specify the issues that would appear in the swimlane?

Additionally can you tell us what type of project you are working with? Is it a Team Managed project or a Company Managed project? That information will display at the bottom of the panel on the left when you are viewing the board. And is this for a Software project or a Business/Work Management project?

[Nicole Zimmermann]

First of all, thank you @Bill Sheboy and @Trudy Claspill for your help! 

This is the mock up of our case: 

The criteria for these issues are simple to explain: The issues "in Progress" are issues which we are currently working on, but once the issue has to be reviewed/worked on by an external stakeholder for example (e.g. design agency) the issue card should be moved to blocked.

The project is company managed and it is rather to manage our business/work.

Thank you!

Nicole

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

There is no way to do this.  The point of a swimlane is to go across the board and break up your columns into similar sections.

Jira does do something like this when you are moving issues around though - if you pick up an issue to drop into another column, you'll see the column broken up into its different status, much as you show in your diagram, but the overall view will not look like that.

[Trudy Claspill]

I concur. There is no native method to do this.

If "In Progress" and "Blocked" are statuses you could split them into separate Columns on your board, but you can't divide a single column in this manner.

[Nicole Zimmermann]

Thank you all, I divided the column by adding a second status! 

[Yuri Lapin _Release Management_]

Hi @Nicole Zimmermann 

Trust you are well.

As Guys explained above with standard Agile boards the only option is to map multiple statuses to a single column. It will work. The problem is ... it's not good visibility as you actually see it only when move. So, you probably have to name it "Doing: In Progres/Blocked" so guide people to it.

If you up to Partner Apps I would suggest to try out Advanced Agile Boards where we have "Column Grouping" functionality and you can stack statuses within groups either vertically ( emulating swimlanes per column) 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zeaQJqcoyiea7TKwzyK2hm16PLwp-mFr/view?usp=sharing

or horizontally

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JMg76g83eFUKmixpxTqHXRMrApdyJj1L/view?usp=sharing

p.s Upload images function in confluence is failing as I am writing this comment so I will upload images later. You meanwhile can try to links above.

Cheers,

Yuri.