How to Simplify Permission Management in Jira: Challenges and Marketplace Add-On Recommendations

Eduardo_u22ick

I am currently managing a project in Jira with a particularly complex structure:

• More than 50 different roles, each with specific permissions that need to be tailored to the various needs of users and teams.
• Approximately 250 active users, distributed across several groups, with different levels of access and responsibilities within the platform.
• Close to 275 projects covering various areas, including development, support, and management, making the administration of permissions and visibility a daily challenge.

The volume and diversity of users and projects have turned permission management into a chaotic task. We face situations such as:

1. Inherited roles and permissions causing inconsistencies in access configurations.
2. Undesired visibility, exposing sensitive information to users who should not have access.
3. Difficulty auditing permissions, as we lack centralized tools or clear reports to facilitate tracking.
4. Manual assignments, increasing the likelihood of human errors and making it difficult to maintain an organized and secure structure.

Given this scenario, I am looking for recommendations on Atlassian Marketplace add-ons that could help simplify and optimize the management of permissions, roles, and users. Some useful features might include:

• Tools for auditing and bulk analysis of permissions.
• Automation of role and permission assignments based on the organization's predefined policies.
• Clear visualization capabilities, such as dashboards or reports, to quickly identify and resolve permission issues.
• Features to more efficiently manage roles and access across multiple projects.
• Integration with monitoring tools or external platforms to consolidate information.

Any recommendations for add-ons or specific strategies that have proven effective in similar environments would be very helpful in addressing these challenges and ensuring more robust and scalable administration in Jira.

Walter Buggenhout

Hi @Eduardo,

While reviewing some older questions, I bumped into yours and noticed it remained unanswered.

This may be because it rather requires consultancy than a quick Q&A. What some of your statements is telling me, is that it seems over time your environment has run out of control. For example, having more than 50 permission roles for a team of 250 feels significantly off, to be candidly honest.

I - obviously - don't know your organisation internally, but I have seen many organisations with a lot more users that that being able to cope with 5 to 15 permission roles and less than 10 permission schemes to manage permissions across the entire organisation (again, with a lot more projects).

Before looking into marketplace apps or tools, I would recommend looking at your organisation and the work happening in Jira, and take a blank sheet to redesign the ideal permissions architecture for the tool based on best practices. That means: setting up your project permissions role based - adding groups and (only if it is not possible otherwise) individual users to those roles on a per project basis. If you think of project roles from user types in Jira (and not from your org chart), you may find that you can reduce the number of project roles significantly. As an example, the following set of project roles might bring you a lot further than you might at first site expect:

• 👩‍💼 Project Administrator
• 👩‍🦼 Power User
• 👭 Team Member
• 👀 Viewer
• 👨‍💼 External Collaborator

When you manage to figure out a significantly simplified design, build a (limited) set of permission schemes that you can then connect to your projects to replace the current set. That will force you to go through a time consuming, tedious and not much fun cleanup exercise, but it should lead to a much more scalable and manageable situation in the future that should pay off (and may help you save on marketplace license fees).

If you are not sure if you can tackle this yourself, I would recommend you to reach out to an Atlassian partner near you to help you address this, implement best practices and get you underway with a clean slate.

Hope this helps!