Project Management via excel and spreadsheets is not something savvy project managers would do. In the world of artificial intelligence (AI) & big data analytics depending on manual data management is a toxic waste of time and effort.

Excel project management becomes too taxing over time and takes the focus away from core project works. You tend to

• Spend more time to maintain project data
• Juggle between spreadsheets
• Drift away from strategic project activities
• Delay in delivery

On the other hand, streamlining your project management process can lead to increased efficiency.  There are multiple projects in-flight at any given time and building a process and templeting them is the right thing to do.

With Project Templates. You can

• Standardize business processes
• Greater alignment of people and technology to processes that work
• Proven & predictable desired outcomes
• Prevent human errors

With the help of  top project template, project managers can replicate and reuse the structure and content of existing projects, including milestones and tasks with start date, end date, estimated hours to speed up new project creation and execution.

Let’s look at some top project templates that can help you streamline your project management process.

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Conclusion

Efficiency and effectiveness are key to successful project management. Having well-defined processes provides clarity to the team, reduces confusion and ensures timely execution.

This becomes even more important with remote team management. The biggest benefit is crucial process steps aren’t missed and predictable desired outcomes are achieved effortlessly.

With Orangescrum task management tool you can define custom status workflows for your distinct business functions be it recruitment, procurement, content management and delight your customers with on-time high quality delivery.

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You have deployed the right project management tool, have the resources lined up, all the approvals & funding and ready to take-off. The team is excited and everything goes into chaos as the team begins the project execution.

Having a project management tool isn’t enough. The idea is to make sure the tool provides you with some of the most critical project management features that enable execution as per the project plan.

Let’s take a look into the key project management software capabilities that enable successful project completion.

Work breakdown Structure – Project Templates

Project planning is the first step towards setting up your project for success. Having a feature that provides for breaking down your project into smaller manageable & workable blocks is crucial.

You can see the project in entirety and “really” understand what the project entails.

Project Managers have greater control in breaking the project into

• Milestones
• Parent tasks, subtasks and sub-subtasks
• Classifying tasks meaningfully with custom task types and custom labels
• Task estimation at the most granular level

Just imagine the power of doing just these 4 activities! I.e. end to end task management.

The transparency and visibility to the entire project, how it will flow, and the hidden task dependencies come to light along with the time and resource requirements.

Thus, project managers have a better handle on their projects to start with.

Project templates in Orangescrum allow to define the following information as part of the project plan in addition to the list above –

• Checklists
• Task linking
• Assignee
• Start and End dates

So, once you have the template ready you can link it to a project and get going. All milestones, tasks, subtask come to life and execution is focused.

The team have their tasks cut out, no guessing or confusion around what happens next!

Read on to know how you can benefit from automated project templates.

Kanban – Custom Status Workflow

The second feature that is important for project execution is having the relevant status progress queues.

No two projects are alike and have the associated tasks have their own lifecycle.

And when resources work across projects, not having their distinct task status flow may lead to confusion.

At the same time when there is well-defined status workflow, the team is clear on the flow of tasks from one status to another till successful completion.

Task Status Groups in Orangescrum allow for defining multiple status workflows for specific project types.

Each task status group will have

• Multiple custom status
• Progress or completion% for each status
• Colour code each status
• Updating task status auto-updates the task progress

And to maintain clarity, each project can have only one task status group assigned.

Thus, meaningful status ensure important execution steps aren’t missed, process alignment improves, bottlenecks are identified easily and hence prevented too!

So you are better equipped to deal with the most common project management challenges.

All in all, one glance at your Kanban board and the true progress of the project is clear and aids in effective status review meetings with the team.

Time Tracking

Time tracking is very important because our projects are majorly an exchange of skilled time for money.

So completing projects within the agreed timelines is crucial not only for client satisfaction but for profitability as well.

With the right time tracking capabilities you can

• track time spent on each task
• measure the planned vs actual hours spent
• track billable hours accurately
• identify the non-billable hours
• prevent and eliminate non value add activities to improve profitability

Also, time tracking alone isn’t enough. And this brings to the next and most critical aspect – Resource Management.

Resource Management

Project resource management consists of 3 concrete aspects

• Resource Allocation
• Resource Availability
• Resource Utilization

Resource Allocation

Resource Allocation is all about maintaining a healthy resource pool and purposing them to support your project pipeline. Once allocated to a project, resource allocation helps in understanding the resource spread across the projects to know who will work on what and till when.

Resource Availability

Resource Availability paves the way for effective utilization. Not only you know who are your available resources but also how are they occupied, on which tasks and till when.

Most importantly, resource availability ensures that your project resources aren’t sitting idle or you most hardworking resources aren’t overloaded.

Resource Utilization

It helps you measure your team’s productivity and improve their efficiency.

You know exactly how your resources spent their time, how much of it was billable, where did they overspend and why.

Robust resource management capabilities help to

• improve project profitability
• deliver on time
• strengthen project planning
• prevent resource conflicts
• maintain high employee productivity rates

So, do make it a point to ensure your chosen project management software provides resource and time management capabilities combined.

User Role Management

Running large projects with too many resources makes unauthorized access of confidential project data a great concern.

Having robust user role management capability with flexibility to configure permissions and privileges makes a project manager’s life lot easier.

It is not only about maintaining data privacy and protection but also ensuring the team has access to the right data at the right time.

Moreover, you also need to ensure that the teams are allowed to access functions that are relevant to their role on the project.

Too much information or too many features would cause distraction and lead to unwanted errors.

User role management helps to keep things simple. “Need based” access ensures people get to access, use and work with features that are of use to them.

At the same time, roles and responsibilities also become clearer and helps with better project coordination and execution.

You can define meaningful roles and permissions and hence your project RACI kind of gets reflected right within the tool.

Conclusion

Each project team has its own set of requirements but these 5 are the most common yet crucial capabilities that help drive projects to their successful completion.

Make it a point that you have the power of

• Project templates for simplified task management
• Kanban boards and custom task status workflow
• Time Tracking
• Resource Management
• User Role Management

And, imagine you having to rely on multiple systems and tools to get to all this information! What a waste of time and effort!

Orangescrum open source enterprise project management tool brings all of these critical aspects in to one and enables holistic collaboration across the organization.

Centralized access to project information, activities and tasks, resources, visibility to progress and true status of your execution.

Execution, monitoring and improvisation goes hand-in-hand with real time granular view of all moving parts of your project.

Want more? Take a look at all the enterprise project management requirements and capabilities you may need right here!

Project plans are important to adding structure & keeping the focus on your project execution.

Starting with a well laid out project plan provides proper visibility to the depth of the project.

Mainly around

• Scope clarity
• time estimates
• resource and skills requirements
• the technology stack to be deployed
• various inter-department touch points
• overall budget required for successful completion

The above list gives a good glimpse of how your project would shape up as you plan and move through execution.

However, let us first understand some of the salient features of a project plan.

According to Wikipedia –

A project plan, according to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), is: “…a formal, approved document used to guide both project execution and project control. The primary uses of the project plan are to document planning assumptions and decisions, facilitate communication among project stakeholders, and document approved scope, cost, and schedule baselines. A project plan may be summarized or detailed.”

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Now, this is a formal approved document and is considered to be the bible for all purposes of the project.

But when your project hits the execution phase there are tons of things that need to be handled on the fly and referring the document isn’t practical or possible.

Thus, enter – project management tools like Orangescrum that bring your project plan alive in a centralized platform with:

• Detailed work breakdown structure (WBS)
• Task Groups, tasks, subtasks sub-subtasks & checklists
• Estimated hours across each task
• Resource allocation & availability
• Gantt View for dependency mapping
• Task Linking for meaning association among project tasks

Let us take a step by step look at project plans within Orangescrum.

How to create a Project Plan?

Orangescrum Project Plans allow you to replicate and reuse the structure and work breakdown of existing projects, including Task Groups and tasks with estimated hours, task type and task priority to speed up new project creation and standardize workflow processes.

Majority of our clients have reported that their projects usually have a 50 to 70% tasks overlap across their projects.

“It is a humungous waste of precious time to recreate all these tasks again for every single project. Hence project plans are just the thing I was looking for streamlining project planning & execution.” – Hayley Turner, USA

Step 1 – Get to the Project Plan in Orangescrum

Head over to the “More” section from the left menu of Orangescrum and select “Project Plan”.

Step 2 – Name your project plan

• Click on the big + at the bottom right corner of the Project Plan page to create a new plan.
• You will be presented with a pop-up; type your new Project Plan name and click on Save.
• You will now be redirected to the project plan list page and will see the newly created plan.

• Click “Manage Task” on the 3dot menu on the specific project plan card & you will be redirected to the detail page to start building your plan.
• An empty project plan would like below.

• Click on Quick Task Group and Quick Task to start building your plan.

• A completed project plan would look like below.

Step 4 – Activating the Project Plan

• Once you are ready, Click on “create a project” or “add to project” to bring your project plan alive.

Note: Create Project will open the Create Project pop-up with the project plan per-selected. And the Add to Project will open a project listing pop-up to choose the desired project you want to add this project plan to.

Create Project pop-up

Add to Project pop-up

Step 5 – Executing your project plan

• Once you have linked the project plan to a project or created a new project, you will see all task groups, tasks and subtasks auto created within the specific project.
• Head over to the task list and start executing your tasks

Step 6 – Visualize and interact with your live project plan with Gantt Chart.

Gantt Chart is an interactive view of your project with clarity around timelines, task dependencies and how the project would flow from start to end.

Benefits of Project Plans

Well, there are quite a few practical benefits of using project plans.

At a high level, you are able to structure your project, create a vision for your project team and share it with your stakeholders for transparency.

Similarly, what it means in terms of actual project execution is

• Scope is translated into well-defined tasks
• Assigning priority, assignee and time estimates becomes easier
• Create once and reuse forever – saves time & reduces manual efforts
• Processes are streamlined – key tasks aren’t missed
• Human errors are prevented
• Optimize the plan project after project to replicate success
• Teams know what’s on their plate and what to do next
• Reduces chaos and confusion
• Task dependencies help in avoiding delays
• Scope creep or change requests are easily identified
• Greater control over quality & timeliness of delivery
• Overall execution is smoother & faster

Conclusion

Making your processes, teams and technology work together is crucial to a successful project management practice.

Teams always have their plates full, project managers are always concerned about deliverables and clients want reduced costs, high quality product/service in record time.

As different the priority of each of these user segment be, the need is to align them with the collective vision and the project goal.

No matter how great your processes are, if they are not easy to follow and enable the teams to get their work done, they will never be adopted.

Project management and collaboration software brings them all together.

The reasons are very specific as the project management tools

• Save time and hassles for the team
• Help them get the work done – faster
• Enable remote team collaboration
• Project information is centrally accessible
• Reliable & real-time insights instead of data enable faster decision making
• Digital medium grants greater flexibility and ease of use
• Processes become alive, enable adoption & increase org-wide alignment
• Customers are served transparently leading to better retention and CSATs

And lastly let me trigger some thoughts with a list of probable use cases for your project plans:

• Business proposal steps
• Web Development Project Plan
• App development Project Plan
• Product Development Workflows
• SEO team activities
• Audit or QA Project Plan
• Event Planning
• Marketing Campaigns
• New Employee On boarding activities
• Installation Checklists & so on

When did you last reuse an established project plan?

Still recreating manual project tasks for similar projects?

Create automated project plans today with Orangescrum!

Every business needs to establish a long lasting relationship with clients and customers and it is a necessity in the current economic scenario.

Businesses are always watching out for ways to provide positive experiences to their customers throughout the engagement from on-boarding to delivery and continuous support.

Templatizing each of these processes is the key. And this is where using project templates to replicate successful processes becomes crucial.

Project Templates simplify & enable

• Better understanding of the business processes
• Greater alignment of people and technology to processes that work
• Proven & predictable desired outcomes

Project Managers can replicate and reuse the structure and content of existing projects, including milestones and tasks with start date, end date, estimated hours to speed up new project creation and standardize workflow processes.

A project management software like Orangescrum offers comprehensive project template features.

The template features help to improvise & implement new processes much faster.

Based on careful review, customer requests and best practices, you can start with the following 8 project templates.

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Conclusion:

The whole idea of this blog to help you get started with project templates. Whether a seasoned project manager or just starting your project management career, Orangescrum is a proven trusted ally.

The dynamic association of project templates, status workflow, and project plans provides you enough ammo to ensure your well-established processes are brought to life.

You eliminate scope for human error and prevent missing out on process steps.

Thus, sealing any possible cracks in your planning or execution flow. Plus it also acts as a robust checks and balances mechanism for your projects and team members.

Signup Free and follow the 5 simple steps illustrated above to steamrolling your projects!