How to Manage User Roles and Access Control in Orangescrum

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User role management and access control measures prevent unauthorized access to confidential project information. Project information may consist of critical business or client strategy, new product or service launch, financial information, customer information etc.

All such information must always be accessed by authorized personnel only in a “must know” and “need to know” basis.

Furthermore, too much information can also lead to confusion and distraction among the project teams.

Hence, granting access to the right people with the relevant privileges is crucial to project execution and success.

Project teams have a lot of activities and tasks to take care of. And having the right information at the right time is vital. At the same time if you allow everyone to access all the information there is then the team will:

lose focus
get confused as to why they are seeing this information
waste time in getting to the required information

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Similarly, project teams have specific actions that they will perform in a project management tool. Hence, granting them access to all the features of the tool isn’t advisable.

They may wander away into playing, exploring features that they are not going to use. As a result waste time or end up with errors.

It is advisable that the features & actions within the task management tool are configured keeping the requirements of each time for focused execution.

With years of experience in customer success management, we came across many customers who want to give specific permissions to their team members to access project information.

Some Project Managers wanted to give access to team members to view Gantt chart of the project & some don’t. Some want team members to only see their own tasks, while other PMs want team members to view all the tasks in order to maintain transparency.

So requirements always varied with each client, the team setup & the way they handled their projects.

Our customer success team had a tough time to address each requirement as it was difficult to fulfill the requirements with just 4 default roles- Owner, Admin, User & Client.

Again, in large organizations, there would be multiple teams to manage various aspects of a project. So how would PMs manage the project information and control access on ‘need to know’ basis?

This is why User role management is an integral part of our project management software.

Contents

Advantages of User role management-

Define custom Role Groups (read – teams or departments) and Roles like development manager, resource manager or senior developer or the stakeholders of your projects.
Define custom access privileges for the roles
Add Project specific role i.e. you can assign individual role for each project and define the access permission for the roles.
Create and assign private tasks to your team

Pro Tip: Role Groups are high level hierarchy of specific teams or departments within your company. E.g. Development, QA, Marketing, PMO, IT, Infra, Client etc.

Pro Tip: Roles are w.r.t the team members working on the project. E.g. project manager, consultant, architect, DBA, tester,

How to use User Role Management?

In order to achieve the above benefits, you need to first create Role groups and Roles under these role groups. Here is how you can do so-

Create Role Group
Navigate to Profile icon>Company Settings>User Role Management
On the User Role Setting page, hover on the “+” button & Click on the option to “Create New Role Group”.
On the Role group pop-up, you can mention your role groups like: Accounts & Finance, Human Resource, Project leads etc. and the short name for Department.
Click on ‘Create’ to create Role Group.

Once you have created custom role group, you can add custom roles under it and assign role privileges.

Create Role

With a custom role, you can define or control what a user can do within your project or in Orangescrum. The custom user access role is associated to a role group. Every user role has View, Manage & Delete permission for different features/modules such as Task, Project, Time log, Gantt chart etc.

To create a custom user role, you can follow below steps

- Navigate to Profile icon>Company Settings>User Role Management
- On the User Role Setting page, hover on the + icon and click on the Create New Rolebutton
- On the Create New Role Page pop-up, define which “Role” you want to assign to a user like: Developer, Tester, Analyst, Graphic Designer, and Project Manager Etc.
- Further, provide a short name for the User Role
- Select the Role Group under which this role will be associated
- Add user(s) for the new Role and click on Create.

Note: If you add a user to any custom role, then the user will be removed from the previous role. The new role will be assigned to the user.

Now the role created here is applicable for all projects. And this is the default role assigned to the user when you are creating any project and add him as user.

Define User Access Control or Permission of User Roles

Now once you have created the roles, you need to define the permissions for the actions the users can perform. In order to do so, you can follow the below steps:

On the User Role Setting Page, Click on the specific custom role group and role under it.
You can see different modules/features such as Task, Time Log, File, Invoice, Gantt Chart etc.
Click on any module, it will show the complete list of actions of each module in terms of “View, Manage, Delete”.
Check the corresponding box to provide access to that particular role and uncheck to remove the access/permission of that action for the role.
Click on “Save Changes”.

Assign project specific role to user

You can assign a specific role for each project even if the user is assigned to one role in user role setting. This means for company level, you may assign a user to a Project Manager role, but for a particular project you can also assign another role to the same user.

Pro Tip: User role works in 2 ways within Orangescrum.

Account Level Role – The roles and permissions defined from the User Role Settings page are the roles at the entire account level. i.e. if you are an admin then your privileges as an admin are activated across the tool and projects that you are a part of.
Project Level Role – At the same time, you are an admin, but for a specific project, you have been assigned a “role” with diminished privileges. So, the moment you navigate to that project, you can perform actions only as allowed by this diminished role. And once, you navigate to another project, your default account level role & privileges are back in play.

How to create project specific roles?

Navigate to left menu and click on Project.
Go to the project card, and click on three dot icon in both card or list view
Click on Assign Role.
On the pop-up, select the role you want to assign to the user
Click on Save.

How can you use User Role Management in your Organization?

Private Task:

Click on Task Module of the specific role to which user is assigned.
Under View, All Tasks option will be checked. This means the users belong to this user role can view all the task of the assigned projects.
You can uncheck it so that users can view only the task assigned to them.

Only allow Timer for time entry:

Click on the Time log module of the specific role to which user is assigned.
Uncheck the “Manual Time Entry” option under the Manage section.
That will remove the Manual Time Entry, Weekly Timesheet and Daily Timesheet option from the user’s account. The user can log time only through the timer.

Don’t allow to edit time log:

Click on Time log module of the specific role to which user is assigned.
Uncheck the “Edit Time log Entry” option under Manage. This disables users of a role to edit any time log entries.

Allow user to view time log for all the resources

Click on Time log module of the specific role to which user is assigned.
Check the “View All Resource” & “View All Time log” option under View section. This will allow users to view Time log for all the resources.
In similar way, if you would mark “Resource Utilization” & “Resource Availability”, then the user will be able to see the utilization and availability status for all the users.

Restrict users to close Tasks

Click on Task Module of the specific role to which user is assigned.
Unmark “Close Task” to restrict user to close the tasks.

Similarly, if you do not want users to change the task assignment, delete task or edit the due date of the task you can configure those also by deselecting those options as seen in the above image.