Groups, departments, and roles

runorder has three layers that often get mixed up: groups organise people, system roles govern what they can do in the app, and production roles say what they do in a specific production. This article untangles the layers.

Groups and departments

Groups are managed under Admin → Groups. Each group has members with the role Member or Head — heads automatically get extended permissions for their group: viewing and updating members’ profiles, contacts, and reservations. Groups can carry a role category — Stage Management, Crew, Cast, Wardrobe — which makes lists easier to read.

Departments are a kind of group, managed under Admin → Departments, with an optional hierarchy (parent department). Departments are the org chart: a person’s home department shows in the people list, production roles attach to a department, and with the GrandPlanner module on, the department is the unit that gets called to events and that the feasibility engine calculates staffing against.

Administrative groups

Groups can be marked administrative — pure access groups that don’t appear in regular lists. Use them when a permission should go to a hand-picked set of people without the group meaning anything organisationally.

System roles

Every login account has one system role — Admin, Manager, or User — set under Admin → Users. The role governs app access: admins can do everything, managers run day-to-day planning and approvals, users see their own things. Finer-grained permissions can be granted per group and per production on top.

Production roles and externals

Production roles — Actor, Stage Manager, Technician — are assigned per production on the production’s Participants tab or from the person’s Work tab, often with a character and department. They grant no app permissions by themselves.

Guests and contractors without a directory entry appear as external on their productions. If the collaboration becomes regular, use Convert to user under People → External participants — it creates the directory entry and account, and moves every production role across.