Grant access to single Jira project that uses a shared permission scheme

Summary

Some Jira instances use as few permission schemes as possible to reduce administrative complexity.

Sometimes, your Jira projects share a permission scheme, but you need certain users to work on one of those projects and not the others.

Solution

Use project roles to assign permissions isolated to one project

Prerequisites

Let's say there are two projects that share a permission scheme:

• Project Alpha

• Project Gamma

You need some users to be able to work in Project Gamma without being able to access work items in Project Alpha.

We'll accomplish this by creating project roles, associating permissions to those roles, and adding the relevant users to those roles in Project Gamma only.

The permissions associated with the role won't carry over to Project Alpha unless users are also added to the same role in Project Alpha manually.

Create project role(s)

If you don't already have the roles you'd like to use in your projects:

1. Navigate to ⚙️Settings > System

2. Under SECURITY, select Project roles

   1. The Project Role Browser displays, which contains a list of all the project roles in your Jira site

3. Under Add Project Role at the bottom of the page, enter your desired role's name and a description

4. Select Add Project Role

Grant permissions to project role(s) in your shared permission scheme

1. Navigate to ⚙️Settings > Issues

2. Select Permission schemes in the navigation sidebar

3. Find your shared permission scheme in the list and select Permissions

4. For all of the relevant permissions, click Update and add the project role of your choice

   1. For detailed descriptions of what each permission does, please refer to Permissions for company-managed projects

Add selected users to the project role(s)

1. Navigate to Project Gamma

2. Select Project Settings > People

3. Choose Add people

4. Search for the relevant users and choose the project role that was granted permissions

5. Select Add

Now, the users you've chosen will have permissions in Project Gamma only. Even though the project role and associated permissions exist in Project Alpha, users will not have those permissions until they are specifically added to the project role.