Managing custom roles

Keeping roles accurate as the organisation changes. They drift, and nobody notices because nothing breaks.

Keeping roles accurate as the organisation changes. They drift, and nobody notices because nothing breaks.

Review them

1. Open the roles in Admin Center.
2. For each, look at who holds it and what it allows.
3. Remove roles nobody uses.
4. Merge roles that have become nearly identical.

Roles only ever grow

Somebody needs one more permission, it gets added, and it is never taken away. After two years a role designed to be narrow allows most things, and nobody decided that.

Reading what a role actually permits, once a year, is the only thing that catches it.

Watch for near-duplicates

Two roles differing by one permission are usually one role plus a historical exception. Merging them removes a decision nobody remembers making.

Changing a role changes everybody on it

Adding a permission grants it to every holder immediately. Check who that is before saving, because the person who asked is rarely the only one affected.

Empty roles

A role with nobody on it is either finished or forgotten. Remove it, so the list stays short enough that people read it when assigning.

Tie the review to reorganisations

A team split or merge is exactly when roles stop matching reality, and exactly when nobody is thinking about Zendesk permissions.

Record what changed

What you altered and why. The audit log shows the change; only a note explains the reasoning, and that is what makes the next review possible.

See also

• Creating custom roles
• Exporting team member data
• Viewing the audit log