Prevent assignee field change when the issue is created by the CEO

[Javanshir Mustafayev _ HIT]

My CEO wants to prevent the assignees to change this field value when the CEO is the reporter. Is there a possibility to restrict assignee change based on this criteria?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Not easily!  (And not at all in team-managed projects)

The difficulty here is that the right to change the assignee is done with a permission.  Permissions are a set of rules based on people, but the rules are only compounded with OR, there's no conditional logic (no ifs, ands or buts)

Looking just at the "can the current user assign issues to people" permission, you can set up rules that say things like:

• Person is in the group X
• Person is Alice, Bob or Charlie
• Person is the current assignee
• Person is the reporter

Those will all be OR'd together - if a person matches any one of those, they will be able to assign the issue to someone.  There's no way to say "if (reporter = CEO) then only let admins or the CEO reassign it".  The closest you could get is to just say "person is the reporter", but that would stop all issues being assigned by anyone but the reporter.

But with a bit of extra config and some cding/scripting, you can get there.  It is clumsy though.

If you create a new field which is a multi-user-picker, and set the "assign issues" permission to just "the people named in this field", then you could code to populate that field with people who should be able to change assignee when the issue is created (or updated), based on whatever logic you like.  

This does feel like it is only practical when you have a small number of people who would assign, I think it gets clunky if you have a lot.

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Javanshir Mustafayev _ HIT 

Yes, and...to what Nic suggests:

I had to read your question a couple of times to understand it, and I wonder what problem you are trying to solve.  Is the situation:

• your CEO is assigning Jira issues to people when reporting them, and the CEO wants the assignee to keep them to prevent churn,
• people are self-assigning, and your CEO wants issues to stay with the original person to help with accountability, or
• something else?

Sometimes fixing such issues with a tool can lead to unintended consequences, such as the assignee does not change (desired) and someone else is needed to help with the work (not visible any longer).

Kind regards,
Bill

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yes, sorry, I went straight to tech.  It's always worth examining the problem, exactly as Bill says!

[Javanshir Mustafayev _ HIT]

@Nic Brough -Adaptavist-  I have company-managed projects. 

@Bill Sheboy 

• your CEO is assigning Jira issues to people when reporting them, and the CEO wants the assignee to keep them to prevent churn, 
• people are self-assigning, and your CEO wants issues to stay with the original person to help with accountability, or

The answer is YES for both if this is possible?

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Javanshir Mustafayev _ HIT 

Nic was describing how to do this technically, and I was noting this may not solve the root issues...and in fact could cause new challenges for your teams.  Please see Nic's post for his solution ideas.

Thanks,
Bill