When we launched our Project Templates feature, we knew it was going to be a game-changer. Since then, it’s already helped thousands of teams to save time, ensure consistency, become more efficient, and build on their wins.

That’s because, no matter what kind of team or industry you’re in, it’s easy to create project templates that will transform your workflow. With Project Templates, you can build templates from both existing projects and from scratch — eliminating the need to manually populate projects over and over again. 

Here are 6 benefits of project templates that every team in your organization can enjoy.

1. Do things your way — every time

When you find a way that works for you, why try to reinvent the wheel? With project templates, you can create consistent, standard processes that ensure your team is always following your predefined best practices. Create new templates entirely from scratch and ensure that everyone knows exactly what needs to be done (and when) in order to hit your goals and put your big picture plans into action. 

Call us nerds, but we think that a well-planned project is a thing of beauty. Did you create the platonic ideal of a project? Did you do something a little differently and find that it paid off in a major way? Make those standout wins into your new normal.  By turning great projects into project templates, you can continuously improve your processes and effortlessly roll those improvements out to the whole team. And by ensuring that your best projects are transformed into repeatable and actionable project templates, you can constantly build on your team’s hard work to improve productivity and efficiency — one project at a time.

Do something once, benefit from it over and over…that’s what we call a return on investment. Use your pre-made project templates to quickly spin up new projects without sacrificing on quality or needing to double-check that you’ve covered all your bases. Make your project templates as detailed as you like: get granular by adding tasks, assigning those tasks to specific roles, mapping out timelines and due dates, and creating dependencies. Then, instantly create tailored projects that are prepopulated with all the information you need, without needing to lift a finger. All that admin time spent creating projects adds up, so just think — every minute you put towards creating your project template is time you’ll be saving down the line, again and again and again.

Sometimes, when you’re deep in a project, it’s easier than you think to accidentally miss something important. Maybe you forgot to set a task for something you needed to do, or it entirely skipped your mind to get the sign-off you needed at the right stage. In other words: you made a human mistake, because you’re (presumably) a human. But human error can still result in delays as you circle back to catch up. Worst case scenario? You miss something crucial and need to redo work, or end up scurrying to make a deadline that you didn’t even know you had so you don’t lose face in front of a client. With project templates, everything is outlined from the outset, so you never have to worry about accidentally forgetting something along the way.

When you’ve just won a new client, it’s essential to start things off on the right foot. Put your client relationship first by creating an onboarding project template that will help you to make a great first impression.  Your client onboarding template will help you to make sure that every client gets the same special treatment. Use it to assign scheduled check-ins at regular intervals (like after the first 7 days, 14 days, and 30 days) to the dedicated account manager so they always know when to follow up without overcrowding, set quarterly business reviews in advance, and create tasks for sending over any important materials at the right stage of your client’s journey.

Every organization has certain operational processes they need to follow. These can be company-wide, like raising purchase orders and submitting expenses, or specific to the workflows of certain teams, like marketing operations.  Creating templates for your operational projects helps to maintain consistency (which in turn makes it easier for your employees to actually use them), ensures that all of the important information is captured so there’s no more chasing people up for missing details, and gives team members visibility over the progression of their request.

Some great ways to use project templates

Looking for some ways to apply project templates to your team’s workflow? We’ve got some ideas. 

  • Client onboarding

  • Quarterly business reviews

  • Service delivery plans

  • Asset production and delivery

  • Client onboarding

Are you using project templates in a way we haven’t mentioned here? Let us know in the comments — we’d love to hear how they’re helping you! If you haven’t started using Project Templates just yet start using the feature today and let us know what you think!  Project Templates are available on the Deliver, Grow, and Scale plans.