Internal projects
🟦 An introduction to internal projects
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Your company / Internal projects
Distinction between external and internal projects
In Leadtime, every activity of an organization - everything that consumes working time - is referred to as a "project".
We make a basic distinction between two categories:
- External projects: External projects are typically billable and generate direct revenue. As customer projects, they contribute directly to the company's success, which makes them particularly valuable.
- Internal projects: Although these are not directly billable, they are essential for long-term strategic goals and ongoing operations. They include the development of new products or administrative tasks. Even without direct sales, they make a lasting contribution to increasing the value of the company.
Within the two groups, there is a further distinction between ongoing and one-off projects. One-off projects have a specific goal that leads to project completion when achieved. Ongoing projects, on the other hand, are continuous: in the case of customer projects, this includes ongoing support services, maintenance contracts and support.
In the case of internal projects, ongoing activities typically relate to the various administrative processes of the organization, such as sales, marketing and accounting.
We have deliberately placed internal projects in the "Your company" area. When setting up Leadtime in your company, we recommend analyzing exactly which "departments" or recurring processes exist in your organization and creating these in the form of "internal projects" in the "Your company" area.
Example of a sensible internal project structure
Example: The software studio "Archiolabs" has many internal tasks in addition to its customer projects. Some employees are responsible for sales, others for marketing or accounting. In addition, the management is developing a new software product that is being implemented step by step alongside day-to-day business.
In order to map these activities in the system, the management of Archiolabs should create the following projects in the "Your company / Internal projects" area:
Recommendations
- In future, all sales activities should be recorded via the new internal sales project - this also applies to marketing and accounting.
- Create separate tickets for recurring sales activities such as "cold calling". A separate ticket is also recommended for processing important leads. This not only makes collaboration easier - your employees can also allocate their time precisely to the individual activities. This allows you to see exactly how many hours are spent on cold calling or processing individual leads, for example.
- Your employees can also book their working time directly to a project - without assigning it to a specific ticket. This is useful for internal accounting projects, for example, as this is a uniform, ongoing activity that only ties up working time.
- Create individual internal projects for projects with a specific goal - for example, the development of a new product. As with external individual projects, you can then prepare these with the help of work packages.