Darshan Hiranandani -How Does the Permission Paradigm Work in JIRA Align Regarding Who Can See What?

[Darshan Hiranandani]

Hi everyone, I’m Darshan Hiranandani,  trying to better understand how permissions work in JIRA Align, specifically regarding who can see what content. For example, I have a Product Owner (PO) who can see the teams within her ART, but when she tries to view teams outside of her ART (e.g., by selecting "Programs" → "View All Teams"), she gets an error message asking her to "contact the administrator." Should the PO be able to see all teams by default, or is this restricted by some permissions setting in JIRA Align? Is there a specific place in the permissions configuration where this can be managed? I’d appreciate any insights into how permissions are structured in JIRA Align, especially when it comes to controlling visibility of teams and other content across different ARTs. Thanks in advance for your help!

Regards

Darshan Hiranandani

[Steve Sauser]

@Darshan Hiranandani  Thanks for your question!  

This becomes a little multi-faceted, but I will call out what is pertinent to your question.  Each of the hyperlinks below are to either a specific page in Help or a summary page with multiple pages below that are pertinent.  

Role Toggles (Permissions to do activities

• Every user in JA has 1 (and only 1) Role. 
• The Role has permissions via toggles.  These define what actions a given Role is able to take within their memberships.  
  • For example a Role might have permission to Add a Feature, but not have the permission to Delete a Feature.  This simply means for any space where they have membership they can Add, but for no space can they Delete. 
• You can find more details on Roles in Jira Align Help

 Membership to Teams

• Membership drives the ability to see/access a given Portfolio, Solution, Program, or Team.  If a given user does not have membership to Program ABC, then they will not be able to access anything in that Program. 
  • Note:  Membership at a level higher than Program ABC, such as the Portfolio that Program is part of would allow that user access to Program ABC.  
• Without membership, if a user attempts to access the given Portfolio, Solution, Program or Team they will be denied and encounter the message you called out.  
• You can find details on the Membership in Jira Align Help

Team Roles

• Team roles are basically an additional restriction of specific actions for a user as a member of a Portfolio, Solution, Program or Team.  
  • These will not provide additional permissions to a given user.  
  • As an example if the Role of the user does not have the ability to Save a given work item the Team Role would not provide that ability even if the Team Role has that permission.  
• You can find details on the Team Roles in Jira Align Help

[Lyle Rosdahl]

There are two main permissions here (more or less). There are the role permissions that give you access to view (and add, edit, delete, & rank) teams under the Teams (or Program or Portfolio) section of Roles in your admin settings. Then there are also the teams that the user has access to in People > <user> > Teams. So if you set permissions to allow users to view teams, they'll be able to see all the teams their user has listed under teams. 

Also note that, from my understanding, if a user has access to a portfolio team, they'll be able to see the program teams under that.