About INITS

Innovation Network Integrating Technology for Society (INITS) is a student-led, non-profit out of Thailand. Their core mission is to build real world products that make a social difference. Digitizing nursing homes and creating assistive devices for people with disabilities are two remarkable examples of their missions.

INITS operates like a start-up inside a university with two teams of 40 university students from diverse academic backgrounds.

The Tech team is a mix of frontend and backend developers and the Business team has UX+UI designers and business analysts. Both teams move through a clear growth ladder from Junior to Senior. Leadership roles rotate annually, giving everyone a chance to learn, mentor, and lead.

The challenge

Each semester, INITS runs multiple parallel projects across teams that change annually as students graduate. That changing nature of these teams caused projects management pains.

• New students had to learn tools quickly to start contributing.
• Project leads struggled to see who was doing what across teams.
• Promotions from Junior to Senior and performance tracking were inconsistent and manual.
• Commercial tools like Jira were too heavy, while Linear and ClickUp lacked self-hosting options in line with university IT policies.

Running innovation projects while staying compliant and structured became harder with every intake of new students.

Why Plane was the best fit

When the INITS leadership team discovered Plane, it checked the boxes of simplicity, scalability, and self-hosting.

Self-hosted on university infrastructure
INITS could run Plane’s Commercial Edition securely and privately on its own network, perfectly in line with their policies.

Built for agile learning
Students could use Issues, Cycles, and Modules to manage real sprints, retrospectives, and product scopes just like a real-world software team.

Structured performance tracking
Custom fields would help mentors assign and track estimated points per task, turning performance reviews into transparent, data-driven efforts.

Cross-functional collaboration
Tech and business teams could now organize work using Permissions and Teamspaces. The GitLab integration kept documentation, commits, and acceptance criteria in sync.

Implementation and rollout

The Tech team migrated all ongoing projects first, replicating their workflows in Plane. Soon after, the Business team joined in, creating dedicated projects for UX+UI design, business analysis, and outreach.

Mentors ran orientation sessions for new students at the start of every semester, showing them how to manage their sprints and track progress inside Plane.

The result? Everyone from freshmen to seniors was working in a single, consistent environment.

Since adopting Plane

INITS has standardized how student-led projects were planned, executed, and evaluated. Its impact has gone beyond software. They have not just built a more organized, but also a motivating learning ecosystem.

• Speed and visibility
  Project leads can now see every contribution and unblock students faster, keeping sprints on schedule.
• Faster onboarding
  New members learn Plane within days, reducing set-up time every semester.
• Automated progress tracking
  Task-based points automatically map to the growth ladder, removing manual evaluation and bias.
• Higher ownership and morale
  A centralized workspace offers the big-picture view to students so they can see their individual contributions making a difference.

Projects like Big Shield for household data analysis by social workers, Echo Echo for the cognitive rehabilitation of schizophrenics, Links, a smartwatch for the hearing-impaired, and Gray Matter for digitizing nursing homes now all run end-to-end on Plane.