The scenario: An enterprise software product has a heavy navigation system and a vast amount of functions. It's important to keep the number of primary-level tabs at a minimum, because the menu is already quite large.
There are a lot of functions that are set-and-forget, which can be performed by an administrator in a central location (example: add a new user to the system). These functions will go under an Administration tab, and only be seen/accessed by those with the administrator role.
There are also tasks that are performed daily by regular users, and also centralized (where it makes sense to manage them without their becoming part of another domain in the app), such as managing all contact records in the system. My solution was to put them under Administration and role-base them, but our team feels very strongly that our users in non-administrator roles wouldn't look for them there. They're pushing for another primary-level tab called Maintenance. (We're in the healthcare vertical and "Administration" is already a word that means several things.)
From past experience, I've found that having two tabs that are similar-ish but different is bad, because users will forget where different items are housed, and digging through menus for items is frustrating.
We intend to do formal usability research around this, but is there a better solution than having two parallel primary-menu tabs for administration-ish functions?