The work that can’t be charged to a project is holding your org together
In a recent stakeholder interview, a leader walked me through how her company prioritizes. Every initiative comes with a business case and KPIs that tie it back to a company objective. Makes sense. Every company is under cost scrutiny in one form or another.
Then she described her week. She spends most of it hunting for projects her people can charge their hours to, because the company requires every hour to land on an approved code. Looking for codes isn’t chargeable. So the function that keeps others running is the one that can’t justify itself in the system that decides what exists.
We spent the earliest years of our careers learning time tracking. It exists to allocate cost, whether in an agency where it ties directly to billing or in-house where it rolls up to the income statement and balance sheet.
Project codes were never meant to describe an organization’s shape. But once every hour must land on a code, the code list becomes an org chart in practice.
Work with no code has no budget, no owner on paper, and nothing to point at during a cut. The first function that can’t produce a line item is the first one to go.
Some of the most necessary work in an organization doesn’t map to a billable project:
Onboarding and offboarding.
Tool administration, license true-ups, user management, and the inevitable tech support that follows.
The cross-team review cadence that keeps design and engineering in step.
The reporting layer that makes the engineering tracker legible to everyone who is not an engineer.
Intake, which is the only reason six teams aren’t working on the exact same thing.
Answering “who owns this?”
None of it ends.
A meaningful share of this work supports capital initiatives directly, but may be sitting in overhead anyway. It stays there because the funding conversation happens at the VP level and above, where budget owners are protecting hours they’ve already been allocated.
We ran this at a 500-person design organization. Working with finance, we moved 50% of operating expense time billing onto the projects the work genuinely supported. Opex came down to 10% of the org without anyone leaving. The time had been capital work all along. Same people, same work, correctly attributed.
The process is easier for someone who speaks both languages: the one the team operates in, and the one that finance knows.
List the ongoing work and split up what percentage of time supports capital initiatives. It’s usually a larger share than the team expects. Give the group the codes it should already have.
For the rest, put a dollar value on each item you can: licenses recaptured, hours returned by faster onboarding. Decide at the budget review that this is work you’re willing to pay for.
Get someone who knows the work into the conversation with the controller. They may not have been told this work exists. Controllers can carve out a code and a budget line for work that has neither.
If your ops function had to defend its existence using only the codes charged last quarter, could it?
The leader I spoke to already knows the answer, which is why she spends time each week hunting. Budget season is the wrong time to find out. The fix is in how work gets coded, and it’s cheapest to do while money is still there.