The permission I need is held by a role I do not hold — what now?¶
Audience: anyone an act is refused to, and in particular the person who administers a project and has to unstick it — the "oh no, I have a problem" person.
Sooner or later an act is refused: you try to move a document into a folder, set its language, configure a policy, and the system says no. Most refusals end there and the answer is ask the person who holds it. Some refusals — the ones where you could legitimately hold the missing role — end differently: the refusal itself carries the way through, as an act with a name, a duration and an ending.
That act is break-glass. This topic is about meeting it, using it, and reading what it leaves behind.
1. The refusal that carries a door¶
A refusal always names what was missing and where, in human words — the act you attempted and the project it was attempted in, never a permission constant and never a scope UUID. Beyond that it says as much as it honestly can, and there are three levels of that.
- The plain refusal. "In VAL-CARDIO — Cardio Sample Project you do not have the permission to organize documents into folders. Ask someone who holds it there." The system knows the act and the place — the project by its code and its name, the way you would name it out loud — and stops there.
- The refusal that names the holders. "…It is held there by QMB — ask one of them." Now you know whom to ask, by role name rather than by abstraction.
- The refusal that is a door. "…You may take it on yourself — it will be recorded." — with the act itself on the message, as a button: Staff yourself as QMB.
The third form appears only when the server has established that you may actually open that door, and there are exactly two ways to hold one:
- you hold the project's staffing authority (you can already staff anybody into that role, yourself included) — the button reads Staff yourself as QMB; or
- you hold a role that this project has declared may cover the missing one — the button reads Take over QMB, and the dialog behind it names the role you are coming from: "You hold Regulatory Expert, which may take over QMB here — this will be recorded." That declaration is emergency cover.
If more than one role would do, no single button can honestly stand for two different offers: the button becomes Take one of these roles and the choice moves into the dialog, where each role carries its own sentence. And a refusal that offers something stays on screen longer than an ordinary one — it has to be read and acted on — but it still dismisses itself; repeating the refused act brings the door back.
Nothing is ever inferred. A refusal that says only "you do not have the permission this needs" means the server said only that. No door is invented, no role is guessed at.
2. Breaking the glass¶
The button opens one dialog, and everything the act will record is on it before anything happens.
- For how long. Three declared windows — 30 minutes, 60 minutes (the default) and 1 day. You are choosing an ending at the same moment you choose a beginning; that pairing is the whole point.
- Why do you need this role? Required, short, and in your own words. On this path it arrives prefilled with the act that was just refused, in the same words the refusal used — and it stays editable, because "move SOP-014 into Processes" is a better answer than "organize documents". What it is not is skippable: Take the role stays unavailable until the field says something, and the server refuses a blank one too. The reason is the only part of the record that says why the glass was broken; without it the trail answers who and for how long and stops exactly where an auditor's question begins.
- What happens to the record, stated on the dialog rather than discovered afterwards: "Your name, the role, the window and this note are written to the project's trail. The role gives itself back when the window closes."
Take the role, and you hold it. The confirmation says so and tells you what to do next — "You now hold QMB in Cardio Sample Project for 60 minutes — repeat your action." The refused act is deliberately not retried for you: the door and the act stay two separate, separately-attributed things.
You are staffed in your own name. A person covering a role is a different person doing the work, which is exactly the fact four-eyes exists to establish, so the record says "she held QMB, from then until then" — never "she acted for him". Impersonation does not exist in LQMS and never will.
Breaking the glass deliberately¶
A refusal is not the only way in, and for two people it is not a way in at all:
- an administrator who holds no content permission in a project is never offered the acts that would be refused — the system does not show controls you cannot use — so the refusal that carries a door never appears to the very person the mechanism was built for;
- a person who may cover for a colleague through a declared arrangement holds no administrative permission at all, so the configuration surfaces are not theirs either.
So the act also stands on its own, and it stands in the one place everybody has: your own name in the top bar → Break glass…
The entry appears only if you have somewhere to use it. The system asks the server what you could take and where — the same two questions the act itself asks — and shows the entry only when the answer is not empty. If you do not see it, you have no door today, and the answer is the same as everywhere else in this system: ask someone who holds what you need.
It is the same dialog and the same audited act, with three differences that follow from there being no refusal behind it:
- you choose the project first, from the ones you actually have a door in — pre-selected to the project you are standing in, when that is one of them. With only one, it is simply stated;
- you choose the role from what you could take there, and each option says by which of the two ways it is yours to take: "Staff yourself as QMB" where you hold the project's staffing authority, or "You hold Regulatory Expert, which may take over Team Leader here" where a declared emergency cover is what makes it legitimate. Roles you already hold are not on the list — you have them;
- the reason starts empty, because there is no refused act to borrow words from. It is still required, and it is worth a real sentence: "file the CAPA evidence before Friday's audit" is what somebody will read in the trail six months from now.
One thing this list deliberately does not offer is an administrative role — one carrying the authority to staff people, configure a project, or dispose of records. Cover for an absent administrator comes from the organization level, not from a menu (§6). Where such a role genuinely has to be taken, the refusal that names it is still the way, because a refusal comes with the concrete act that justified it.
Everything else is unchanged: the window is declared, the act is recorded, the marker appears, and the project's Emergency cover tab shows what you just did.
3. The marker in the header¶
While you hold any timed role, the top bar carries a chip. It is the reason nobody forgets they are escalated, and it is the reason nobody is ambushed when the window closes.
On a wide screen it is the whole sentence — Acting as QMB — 42 min left — with the project's code beside it. On a narrower one it shortens to the two facts the marker exists for, QMB · 42 min, and on a phone (or when several windows are open on a crowded bar) the chips fold into a single glyph carrying their count. Nothing is lost when it folds: every window keeps both of its acts in that menu.
The project's code appears only when it needs to. The header already names one project — the context switcher — so the chip repeats a project only when your window is somewhere else than the switcher currently says, which includes standing on All projects.
In the last five minutes the marker turns amber and changes its glyph — an hourglass instead of the open lock — so the warning survives a monochrome print, a colour-blind reader and a dark theme alike. It is the pre-expiry warning: expiry is a declared ending, not a trap.
The chip is the trigger for its own small menu, which repeats what you hold and where, notes that it is recorded, and offers the two acts:
- Extend… opens the same dialog again with the same three windows. An extension is a fresh recorded act with its own window, never a quiet edit of the first one.
- End now gives the role back immediately. The chip disappearing is the server's answer, not the click's.
Two properties are worth knowing because they explain what you see:
- The countdown is presentation; the server decides. The window's real end is held by the server and every authorization read honours it live. When the number reaches zero the app asks again rather than hiding the chip — a chip that vanished on your laptop's clock would be your browser answering an authorization question.
- It is a personal marker. It is shown to you and to nobody else. Other people do not see a badge on you; they read the trail, which is where the fact belongs.
4. The ending, and the three shapes it takes¶
The role gives itself back. Expiry is enforced by the authorization read itself, not by a cleanup job — if the housekeeping sweep never ran, nothing would be over-granted; it only tidies the row away and writes the ending into the trail.
Because they are three different facts about a person, the trail keeps them apart:
| In the trail | What happened | Who it names |
|---|---|---|
| Ended early | the role was handed back before the window closed, through End now | the person who gave it back |
| Window closed | the declared window ran out and the system honoured it | the system — deliberately no person |
| Extended | a fresh act with its own window, standing beside the original rather than replacing it | the person who extended |
Where to read them: a project's whole break-glass history is on the Emergency cover tab of its configuration page (see emergency cover §3), and the individual staffing acts also appear, like every other act, on the project's activity trail.
5. When to break the glass — and when not to¶
Break-glass exists so an exceptional intervention looks exceptional. That only works if it stays exceptional.
- Use it when the act is stuck now. The role-holder is unreachable, the operating model has a hole, the release cannot wait. That is what the glass is for.
- Do not use it as a way of working. If you find yourself taking the same role every week, the finding is not about you: a permission that belongs to nobody, or a role nobody is staffed into, is a governance defect. Fix the operating model — grant the permission to the role that owns it, or staff somebody — rather than breaking the glass on a schedule.
- Do not use it to become the workflow. Staffing yourself as an approver so you can approve your own document is the one combination auditors like least, and no window makes it honest. The correct move is unchanged: staff the right role, then let its holder act (administering an LQMS installation §7).
- Planned absence is not an emergency. A colleague on holiday is covered by ordinary, deliberate staffing of a deputy — a decision somebody makes in advance, not glass anybody breaks.
Ordinary staffing is untouched by all of this. Staffing other people, for the long term, is still permanent and still the normal way roles are held; timed staffing is the exception with a name.
6. What break-glass deliberately cannot do¶
- It cannot bypass a review. Four-eyes and the release rules live in each document's workflow role bindings and its type's review policy, not in your permission set. Holding a role for an hour changes who you are in the record; it does not change what the record requires.
- It cannot reach an administrative role through a declared cover. Cover edges may only target roles that carry content work — an edge into an administrative role would hand the master key through a side door. An absent administrator is covered at the organization level instead.
- It cannot be silent. There is no path to a timed role that leaves no trail, and no way to remove what it wrote: the audit trail cannot be edited or deleted by anyone, including the application.
- It cannot be retried on your behalf. After the door opens, the act is yours to repeat.
Governing decisions: ADR-0130 (break-glass — refusals become doors, the declared window enforced by the authorization read rather than a job, the three endings, the header marker), ADR-0131 (declared adoption edges — the second kind of door, and its content-class-only limit), ADR-0117 (role documentation; acting-as/impersonation rejected — why this is own-name staffing), ADR-0121 (the Project Administrator's permission cut, unchanged by break-glass), ADR-0128 (the permission classification that makes "content act" a structural fact), ADR-0012 (permissions are enforced server-side), ADR-0007 (the UI reflects; the server decides — the refusal you read is the server's own sentence). Regulatory frame: ISO 13485 §5.5.1 (responsibility and authority), §4.2.5 (control of records), and the computerised-records expectation that every authority change is attributable and time-stamped (21 CFR Part 11 / EU GMP Annex 11).