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ITSM Roles and Personas

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In this lesson, you will learn:

  • What a persona is
  • The main baseline ITSM roles
  • Which role each SNWR person needs
  • How to give roles and check them

🔁 Quick look back: Last time: Schedules, Time Zones and Holidays. You learned how to build business-hours, 24×7 and holiday schedules, each with its own time zone.

1 “Why can’t Mei approve changes?”

It’s the first UAT day. Things go wrong fast.

  • Mei can’t see the CAB Workbench.
  • Lucas can’t edit the catalog he owns.
  • Sam, an employee, can see every incident in the company.

🎯 The problem: Wrong roles mean people can’t do their job, or can see too much.

👉 The fix: list each persona, pick the baseline role that fits, and give it through a group.

2 Personas and roles

Key term: Persona

A type of user, like “agent”, “approver” or “employee”. Each persona needs different access.

Key term: Role

A set of permissions. Roles decide what a user can see and do.

💡 Good to know: Need a refresher? See Fundamentals › User Administration › Roles & Role Inheritance.

3 The main ITSM roles

SNWR personas and their baseline roles. Employee, Sam Lee: no role, uses Employee Center to ask for help. Agent, Abel Tuter and the L2 teams: itil, works incidents, problems, changes and tasks. Approver, Beth Anglin: approver_user, approves requests and changes. Major incident manager, Daniel Okafor: major_incident_manager, runs major incidents. Change manager, Mei Chen: change_manager, runs CAB and approves changes. Catalog manager, Lucas Ferreira: catalog_manager, manages the service catalog.
Figure 1. Six personas, six baseline roles.

💡 Good to know: Some processes also have narrower roles, for example roles that allow incident work only. Check the docs for your release before you design.

4 Give roles through groups

You learned this with assignment groups: roles go on groups. For a role only one or two people need, make a small group for it.

Group Role and members
SNWR Service Desk itil
Abel and the desk agents
SNWR Major Incident Managers major_incident_manager
Daniel
SNWR CAB change_manager for the chair, Mei
Other CAB members get itil
SNWR Catalog Managers catalog_manager
Lucas

⚠️ Golden rule: Never give admin just to “make it work”. Find the right role instead.

5 Let’s try it: give and check roles

  1. Create the group SNWR Major Incident Managers. Add the role major_incident_manager and the member Daniel Okafor.
  2. Create SNWR Catalog Managers with role catalog_manager and member Lucas Ferreira.
  3. Impersonate Abel Tuter. Check he can open the Incident list.
  4. Impersonate Sam Lee. Check he can’t open the Incident list, but can use the portal.
  5. End impersonation.

6 Quick recap

  • A persona is a type of user, like agent or approver
  • Agents need itil. Employees need no role
  • Special jobs have special roles: major_incident_manager, change_manager, catalog_manager
  • Give roles through groups, even small ones
  • Test by impersonating each persona

7 Check yourself

Think of your answer first. Then tap to check.

1 Which role does a Service Desk agent need? Show answer

itil.

2 Does Sam, an employee, need a role to log an incident in the portal? Show answer

No.

3 Which role lets Daniel run major incidents? Show answer

major_incident_manager.

4 How do you check that roles work? Show answer

Impersonate each persona and try their tasks.

Nice work! Each SNWR persona has the right role. 🎉
Next up: ITSM Guided Setup

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