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Is there any way to set up a strictly read-only access in Align?

Jayme Burkhalter

I am exploring the ability to share access to views in Align with stakeholders that are not regular users of Align, but would benefit from the ability to see certain areas.

These individuals would not benefit from taking up a licensed spot, but we would like to share visibility on the regular.

I tried this by creating the External User role with what I understood as Read-Only access. However, when tested, an individual with this level of access was still able to manipulate the data (change ranking, add data, change fields, etc.)

I am looking for some help to solve the following issues:

create a strictly read-only role for non-licensed users to see data occasionally
better understanding of the toggles in the Role area.
- setting a role to have visible access, but lack the ability to manipulate the data
- this is unclear- toggle to turn on visibility should not mean access to change the data

Accepted answers

Rae Gibbs

@Jayme Burkhalter It is possible to create/modify a System Role and set permissions accordingly so it is only able to view information. For pages that have the ability to edit info, there will be additional toggles that can be disabled to prohibit these abilities. In addition, it is important to not add them as a member to a Program. Doing so, inherently gives them the ability to change the prioritization of the Backlog and make changes to the Program Board. Instead, you would want to only add them as a member to the Portfolio.

Something to clarify, though, is that this will still utilize a license. Some users have more responsibility with entering info in the tool where others are more the receiver of the information being entered. You're still providing them access to Jira Align to view information and get value out of the data that is being entered in the tool. The only user type that does not count as a license is the integrated user. This is defined as an agile team member that is not a team lead (Product Owner or Scrum Master) and uses the integrated team tool as their primary tool. These users are typically created in Jira Align automatically via the integration with a system role that is set in the connector settings. They will rarely log into Jira Align, if at all. They have extremely limited access with what they can see in Jira Align if they do happen to log in.

Susan Scott_gs0t6o

Thanks @Rae Gibbs - I would like to point out however that putting developers and testers in a little box reduces their ability to contribute to how something is built as it as prevents them from seeing in the next quarter+ what might be useful context of how they design and build something. In my experience developers and testers are just as creative as product managers and product owners if they are allowed to peer above the top of their stories. Feature level really helps, but in large scale organisations, they need to see context the next level up, for us that is at the portfolio epic or capability level - we have capabilities turned on at the solution level and it is critical that all dev teams can 'see' the content as well as click through to user flow designs, solution designs etc. Without them being able to see this content I have to replicate it at a feature level.

In principle the answer would be you could sync with Jira one level above the feature/epic - I want capabilities and features created in JA, but my teams need access to context and links.

All comments

Rae Gibbs

Jayme Burkhalter

Thank you so much @Rae Gibbs !!

Follow up question: will adding them as a member to the Portfolio enable capabilities at the Portfolio level? Again, looking for strictly read-only. Most of these individuals will not be trained on Align as users in any capacity.

Can you please explain more about the Integrated User and point me in a direction to find out more about setting this up? This sounds a lot like what I might be looking for!

Thanks again!

Chris Gargiulo

@Rae Gibbs

As a follow-up to Jayme's question above, regarding the integrated user privileges, a customer this morning asked whether amending their 'team member' user role to allow for more read only access would alter the status or convert it to a licensed user role? In the customer's Jira Setting-Jira Setup, the default user role=team member and the default team role=developer.

They are having similar needs for individual team members, that work primarily in Jira, to be able to see certain information that does not integrate with features or is stored in their capabilities presently.

I'd really like to gain some more insight for how to better accommodate this type of scenario.

Susan Scott_gs0t6o

This is exactly what I am trying to solve for.

My Jira teams still need to see contextual information above a feature which is sync'd in Jira as an epic. I want them to be able to see the capability and epic above the feature so they can see broader context but they DON'T need to be able add or change information, just see it.

I was thinking about turning on some of the capabilities in the Team Member role type to enable this. Hoping this is the easy solve for the problem as I don't want to have to buy a JA license for all my developers.

Susan Scott_gs0t6o

In principle the answer would be you could sync with Jira one level above the feature/epic - I want capabilities and features created in JA, but my teams need access to context and links.

Rae Gibbs

We agree that team members understanding the value they are contributing to is important. I would highly suggest exploring the Why Details to see if this meets your needs. This can be viewed in both Jira Align at the Story and Feature level as well as synced over to Jira. This provides details of the parenting of information several levels above the feature level in a text format in Jira. The Why button in Jira Align presents a prettier interface with the cascading information.

The article I previously shared has more details and also links to one of our knowledge base articles with even more info. If you explore this and feel your team members still need more, then that would result in purchasing licenses for them.

Susan Scott_gs0t6o

The why is great for context but it doesnt solve the issue i have when we have documents, designs, etc 'attachments', use cases, etc that are held at the level above - if I then have 5 features that break that down from the capability above - i have to replicate everything - right now we are going to try a 'hack' which is creating a common feature to hold this stuff that everyone can see

Rae Gibbs

Understood. For that level of access, you would be looking at having to purchase licenses for them.

Jayme Burkhalter

Hi Everyone, I appreciate the dialog!! Unfortunately I am no closer to an answer than when I began. Though I would eventually benefit from conversations around Team level access, I am more concerned with read-only visibility for individuals like Sponsors, Planners, Directors, etc. These people are key to the overall process, especially as it relates to intake of new proposals, prioritization and approval of new work within the existing approved portfolio, but they absolutely do not require a full blown license for Align. Many of these individuals do not even regularly utilize JIRA let alone Align. I can see expanding licensing in the future when Align becomes a more widely used tool as we scale, but this is simply not the case in the MVP stage of our implementation. That however, does not remove the need for stakeholders to be able to access the data within Align and see it while someone such as myself drives a prioritization and approval ceremony.

Before Align, we would share dashboards and roadmaps in Jira which could be accessed for read-only purposes by non-users of JIRA. How can we achieve the same level of sharing using a bigger, better tool? This looks to be a major gap!

Rae Gibbs

Unfortunately, the short answer is those folks would need a license. The omission of having a license is not based on view only. One of the default System Roles we create a lot of times with customers is a View Only role to give access to the exact functional roles that you mention. You can provide them view only access by setting the permissions accordingly for their System Role and adding them only as a member to the Portfolio. Anyone who utilizes this role will be considered a licensed user.

Susan Scott_gs0t6o

There are 2 requirements here:

1. As @Jayme Burkhalter says - non-regular users who need to see information - typically management or stakeholder types - using a license for these types of users is expensive - not being able to give them read only access creates overhead because you then have to figure out how to do reporting outside of the tool

2. Team level Jira users who use Jira day to day but need to see information or click on links in JA about what they are building - and the Why button is NOT the answer - using a license for these types of users is very expensive and then I'm wondering what is the point of Jira except as a bridge to downstream dev tooling - not being able to give them a bit more access creates overheads e.g. I have to have a separate place to put the context, the document links, etc, my JA users become the bottleneck for contextual information held in the level above which describes the outcome creating overhead on them to provide the visibility which ends up in emails mostly and then you are having conversations outside of the application

If the objective is to force us to buy more licenses you are on the right track

If the objective is to enable the connection from strategy to execution and an ecosystem to build the right thing and build the thing right then you are creating a wall which is breaking the ecosystem

Jayme Burkhalter

Thank you @Susan Scott

This is an issue, Atlassian. I dont plan to train my whole enterprise on the ins and outs of USING Align, but there are very real use cases where I need to be able to show them what's happening. They need to at least be able to look in the window, if they are not allowed into the room.

Planners: should be able to see the Enterprise Room when they are trying to plan their proposals according to strategy. if they cannot see what this beautiful tool has to offer, we have to recreate it in a second system. As you can imagine, this is not ideal.

Executives/Directors: we are desperately trying to give them the tools to prioritize according to value and strategy. They dont need the ability to do all the things like voting and scoring and ranking yet, we have a ways to go before they are ready for that. But we would like them to be able to look at how proposals stack up against their strategy on their own. They wont use the tool 99% of the time, this does not justify a whole license!

Stakeholders: Need to see the workload. We have people positioned to manage the workload, but these people should be able to see what is there. If we are shouting about transparency in agile delivery, we need to open the view to the right people.

@Tina Behers and @Rae Gibbs I appreciate your insight on the WHY card, but this does not solve the issue. I agree with you, Align is VERY complex and we dont want untrained fingers in the pot, trust me!! I am still learning as one of my companies SMEs on JIRA/ALIGN, i dont have the capacity to train outliers. But shutting out access to view is problematic. If there is some configuration that I am missing, please direct my course, but so far, I am not finding a solution. Truly appreciate this dialogue however, love to see others with the same issues.

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