[Brightspace Admins] Are there any concerns with creating too many roles?

Sam.L.89

As a Brightspace Admin, you can create new roles which have custom permissions. We are discussing adding a new role, and would like to check with the community if they have had any concerns or can raise considerations for adding new roles, and having too many roles on the system?

Olly.F.893

Great question. As a general principle, the best thing is to have only as many roles as you actually need. That's to say: only make a new role if you are sure that it needs different permissions to an existing role.

The main reasons for this are:

1. Each role has interactions with every other role. The more roles you have, the more you have to check that each role has the right permissions in relation to other roles. (For example, whether one role can see another role in the classlist, and so on).
2. The more roles you have, the more work is required to ensure that permissions are consistent across similar types of role. For example, if there are several learner-type roles, and you make a permission change to one of them, you'd have to keep on top of whether or not the other learner roles should also be updated.

One of the main pieces of advice I'd give is to document what the purpose of each role is, so that it's clear for you and anyone else who administers them in the future. You can use the description field in the role settings for this, as a brief summary.