Delegating work items to other teams without exposing the entire “leadership” project (i

Melissa Mleczkowski

Hi everyone,

we’re using Jira Software Cloud (company-managed projects) and I’m trying to design a permission model for the following scenario:

 

 

Context

 

• We have a restricted “leadership” project where only a small leadership group can see all issues.
• We also have multiple team projects/boards (separate teams) where each team works on their own backlog.

 

 

 

Goal / Problem

 

 

Leadership wants to delegate tasks created in the leadership context to one or more teams, while ensuring:

 

1. Teams must not see the full leadership backlog/project
2. Leadership must be able to track the status/progress after delegation
3. Delegation should support:
   
   • assigning to one team
   • assigning to multiple teams
   • in some cases, visibility limited to a single specific person in a team
4. Teams should ideally be able to work from their own board (or a team view) without constantly switching into the leadership project.
5. We want to avoid a solution that requires creating hundreds of manual security combinations (team A + leadership, team B + leadership, team A+B+leadership, plus user-specific cases, etc.).

 

 

 

What we tried / constraints

 

 

• Using separate projects and linking issues doesn’t work well because links are only visible to users who have access to both projects.
• Classic permission schemes / project roles are too coarse.
• Issue Security seems promising, but:
  
  • each issue can only have one security level, and
  • we are unsure how to handle multiple team combinations and person-specific visibility without making it unmanageable.
• We can use Automation, but we want a robust design that reduces human error (e.g., wrong security level set).

 

 

 

Questions

 

 

1. Is there a recommended Jira Cloud design pattern for this?
2. Can Issue Security be configured to grant access dynamically based on:
   
   • a multi-group picker (teams) and/or
   • a multi-user picker (specific individuals),
     while still allowing leadership to track everything?
3. If the issue stays in the leadership project (for visibility), how can teams work on it from their own board/view without seeing other leadership issues? (e.g., cross-project boards vs. dashboards vs. filters)
4. What are the main pitfalls/limitations in Jira Cloud for this kind of “delegate without exposing everything” setup?

 

 

Any guidance, best practices, or examples would be highly appreciated. Thanks!

Nikola Perisic

Welcome @Melissa Mleczkowski 

I see that this is more limited to work items need to be seen depending on the each team. Work item security is designed to have multiple security levels. You can have a single user per security level. You can also use group custom field value. You can create a filter that will only be shared with specific people and therefore that board will only be shown to the leadership (this can be either a group or per user). That way, you will split the work items between leadership and teams. 

Also limiting on who can use the Set Issue Security permission will also point out the ownership of setting the security level.