Manage permissions

You won't want every user in your team to have the same level of access to Jira Work Management. For example, you may want to restrict who can administer Jira Work Management, or prevent users from viewing a project. In this step, you will learn about the different permissions in Jira Work Management and set permissions for a new project.

Overview of roles, groups, and users

A role is a project-specific set of groups and/or individual users. In our example of the design project in the t-shirt business, all product managers need to be able to assign work (issues) across all projects, while senior designers need to be able to assign work on specific design projects. In Jira Work Management, you can define a product manager role that includes all product managers. You can then define a set of permissions with the "Assign issue" permission for this role, and apply this set of permissions to all projects. Individual senior designers can be added to the product manager role on each project, as needed.

Overview of global and project permissions

Global permissions cover a small set of functions that affect all projects in Jira Work Management (for example, permission to administer Jira Work Management). They can only be assigned to groups: 

Project permissions cover a set of more granular functions that affect a single project. For example, permission to create issues in a project can be assigned to groups, users, and project-specific roles.

Now let's put this into practice! You're going to go through the tasks involved to use project permissions to hide a new, secret t-shirt design project from some of your users.

Create a new project role

This project role will only contain users that you want to view a particular project. We will assign permissions to this role in the next step.

1. Choose Settings ().

2. Select System, then Project roles in the security section.

3. Add another project role named "Review".

4. Leave the Description field blank for now and select Add project role.

5. Select Manage Default Members.

6. Select Edit under Default Users and add yourself and Jason to the Review project role (don't add Kate or Emma).

Configure a new permission scheme

The Browse Projects permission controls whether a user can browse a project, i.e. whether they can view the project. Let's assign this permission to your new project role.

1. Choose Settings ().

2. Choose Issues > Permission schemes.

3. Copy the Default Permission Scheme.

4. Edit the copied permission scheme and change the name to "Confidential Permission Scheme".

5. Click Update.

6. Select Permissions for the Confidential Permission Scheme.

7. Remove browse permission for anyone who can log in:
   
   

   1. Click Remove to the right of "Browse Projects"

   2. Check "Application access - Any logged in user"

   3. Click Remove

8. Grant browse permission to our "Review" project role:
   
   

   1. Click Edit  to the right of "Browse Projects"

   2. Select Project Role and Choose "Review" from the menu

   3. Click Grant

Associate the scheme with a new project

For the last step, let's associate the permission scheme with a new project.

1. Choose Projects and select a project, or choose View all projects to visit the projects directory.

2. Select Create project.

3. Choose the project type "Task tracking".

4. Name the project Top Secret Tee and Create.

5. Select Permissions > Actions > Use a different scheme.

6. Set the Scheme to Confidential Permission Scheme and select Associate.

The only users that will be able to browse your new project are Jason and yourself. Note that default members are only added to a role for new projects. You can also use this approach to restrict users from creating issues, adding comments, closing issues, and more.