Creating and Configuring Internal Work Items

Internal work items are Jira work items that are used for tracking time on non-space-related and non-billable activities that your organization needs to account for, such as vacation, sickness, parental leave, or scheduled medical leave. They can also be used to track time spent on company meetings and events, onboarding, and internal training.

Internal work items are usually meant to be available for all employees in the organization, so to make sure that everyone can view and log time to these work items, they need to be granted the Browse Projects and Work on Issues permissions for each Jira space where the Internal work items live. Using a single Jira space to contain the Internal work items makes permission management much simpler, but you can use as many work items in as many spaces as you like.

Internal work items are not used for public holidays. To do that, you must set up one or more holiday schemes for your organization.

When a Jira work item is configured as Internal in Tempo, it is identified and used properly in Tempo Timesheets, Tempo Capacity Planner, and Tempo Financial Manager. Here's what happens when work items are configured as Internal:

• Internal work items are all grouped together on the Internal tabs in the Work Items side panel in My Work and the Resource Planning view, as well as in the Log Time and Plan Time forms. This makes it easy for users to plan time and log time quickly on Internal work items because they're easy to find.

• In Tempo Timesheets, the Billable Hours field is not available when you log your time to Internal work items, even if the Set Billable Hours permission is being used for the Jira space in which the Internal work items exist. This is because the type of activity considered as internal, such as sickness and vacation, is not eligible for billable work.

• The Remaining Estimate field in the Internal work item is not used.

• If you're tracking revenues in Financial Manager, Internal work items are not considered billable, so they are automatically excluded from revenue calculations.

You can create Internal Type Tempo accounts to organize the hours logged to Internal work items. This can be useful when there are several teams that need to track their own Internal work items, or the Internal work items are spread across multiple Jira spaces, and you want to aggregate the logged time from all of them in one Tempo account for easier management and reporting.

Creating a Jira Space and Internal Work Items

Creating Jira spaces and granting Space permissions requires Jira Administrator Permissions.

While not mandatory to do so, it's best practice to create a dedicated Jira space to keep all the Internal work items together for easier Space permission management. Users need the Browse Projects and Work on Issues space permissions to access and log time to the Internal work items in each Jira project where they reside, so it's simpler to have only one Jira project to control and manage the permissions.

Having a single Jira space makes Internal work items more easily identifiable because they all use the same space key, such as "INT". And it's simple to run reports on that single space to see the number of hours logged or planned for each Internal work item, such as to find out how many sick days have been taken for the month. Anyone running reports on the Internal worm items needs the Browse Projects and View All Worklogs permission for each relevant Jira spaces to be able to see the logged time data.

If you have Internal work items in multiple Jira spaces, you can create a separate Internal Space permission scheme to be applied to only these spaces. This makes it easy to then grant the required permissions for all the relevant spaces at once.

To create a Jira space and work items for internal hours:

1. Create a Jira space with an easily identifiable name and key, such as Internal and INT.

2. Grant the Browse Projects and Work on Issues Space permissions so that everyone in your organization can view and log time to the Internal work items.

   If more privacy is required, you can add external contractors or clients to a Jira group and then do not grant the Browse Projects and Work on Issues permissions to this group for the Jira spaces that contain internal work items.

3. Create all the Jira work items to cover your organization's non-space-related activities. You can always add more work items later, but it's best to create most of them before your employees start logging time to them.

   Internal work items should have no Original or Remaining Estimate, no Due Date, and no Assignee.

4. Configure the work items as Internal in Tempo (see below) so that they're available on the Internal tab in the work item side panel to easily view and log time to them, but are not available for logging billable hours.

   If you're not configuring the work items as Internal, make sure that the Set Billable Hours Space permission is not granted to employees so that the Billable hours field is not available for them to log time to these work items .

Configuring Work Items as Internal in Tempo

When you configure Internal work items in Tempo, you select all the Jira work items that you have created for this purpose (from one or more Jira spaces) and add them to a list of work items that are marked as "Internal". Make sure that the Browse Projects and Work on Issues permissions are granted to all appropriate employees in each Jira space where the Internal work items reside. These permissions allow them to access and log time to the Internal work items.

To configure Jira work items as Internal:

1. Select Settings in the Tempo sidebar

2. Under Configuration, select Internal Work Items.

3. In the Work Item Key search box, select a Jira work item that you want to consider as Internal for Tempo. The work item can be in any Jira project, not only a dedicated Internal Jira project.

4. Click Add.

   

   
   

5. To delete an internal issue, click Delete for the issue you want to stop using as an internal issue. The issue is no longer considered as Internal for Tempo, but is not deleted from Jira. Basically, it returns to being a normal Jira issue.

   When you delete an Internal issue that's in a Jira space with the Set Billable Hours permission granted to employees, billable hours are added to the worklogs to match the hours logged to this issue.

   To bulk-edit the billable hours in these worklogs, such as to set the billable hours to 0, see Editing Worklogs in Bulk or watch this video How to Edit the Billable Hours in Worklogs in Bulk