Permissions

Two kinds of people, and a per-action choice of which kind is needed.

Tier	Who	How it is set
Everyone	any member of the Slack workspace	—
Team admin	people on a team’s access list — its managers	Slack: the team’s Edit → Setup Access Control. Dashboard: Teams → the team → Users with access to manage the rotation
Org admin	the workspace’s named admins, plus the person who installed Pagerly and Slack workspace admins as a safety net	Dashboard → Organisation → Admins

Both lists are opt-in. A team with no access list is open. A workspace that has named no admins is unrestricted. Nothing changes for you until you set one.

Team permissions

Everything you can change about a team falls into five groups. For each, you choose who may do it:

Capability	Covers
Overrides & cover	take over a shift, swap with someone, remove an override
Rotation	who is in the rotation, the order, when it hands over
Reminders	the shift reminder sent before a handover
Team settings	name, Slack channel, manager, timezone
Integrations	which PagerDuty schedule, Jira board and alert sources feed this team

Three levels for each:

• Anyone in the workspace
• Team managers + admins — the team’s access list, plus org admins
• Org admins only

Set it once for every team on Organisation → Admins → Team permissions, or differently for one team under that team’s settings. The team’s choice wins. Only org admins can change either.

If you change nothing

Everything works exactly as it does today:

	Team without a managers list	Team with a managers list
Overrides & cover, Reminders	anyone	anyone
Rotation, Team settings, Integrations	anyone	managers + org admins

Overrides and reminders are open by default on every team, because covering a sick colleague’s shift should never need permission you don’t have at 2am. If your org wants them restricted, pick Team managers + admins and it applies everywhere at once.

Always org admin

Action	Who
Read schedules, teams, incidents, status page	everyone
Declare and update incidents, action items, status-page updates	everyone
Create or delete a team	org admin
Add, edit or remove people in the on-call directory	org admin
Escalation policies, integrations, API keys, admins, billing	org admin
Team permission settings	org admin

These are fixed on purpose. Whoever is paged must be able to raise an incident without asking anyone, and an org should not be able to configure itself out of its own billing page.

The same rule everywhere

One check answers on every surface, so the answer can’t drift between them:

• Dashboard — refuses with the reason.
• Slack — the Override button, the team editor and the assistant refuse with the reason, inline or in a DM.
• MCP — the tool returns ERROR: … with the reason. Org-admin tools additionally need the mcp:admin scope on the connection.

A refused person is always told which team, what action, and who to ask:

Only the people who manage Payments can change this team’s rotation. Ask them or alice@example.com.

Deliberately open

Incidents, action items and status-page updates are responder actions: whoever is paged must be able to act. Cover requests are requests, not changes — only the person asked can accept.

Updated 13 September 2026