Project Management templates
Simplify your workflows and optimize your daily routines with our collection of project management templates.
Action Plan
Why create an action plan? Long-term business strategies and goals are only good if you can make them a reality—by accomplishing every small task along the way. An action plan lists those tasks and lays them out in clear detail. It helps you keep everything in order, make sure nothing is missed, and get stakeholders on the same page to complete a project quickly and effectively. This template will help you write an action plan that’s SMART: Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Time-bound.
Job Map
Want to truly understand your consumers’ mindset? Take a look at things from their perspective — by identifying the “jobs” they need to accomplish and exploring what would make them “hire” or “fire” a product or service like yours. Ideal for UX researchers, job mapping is a staged process that gives you that POV by breaking the “jobs” down step by step, so you can ultimately offer something unique, useful, and different from your competitors. This template makes it easy to create a detailed, comprehensive job map.
Parking Lot Matrix
When the creative energy is flowing, a workshop or meeting will yield a lot of new ideas — but not all are on-topic or currently feasible. Roll them right onto a parking lot matrix, a simple, effective tool for separating the best ideas from those that are promising but could use more research or discussion. This template will let you easily make your own parking lot matrix, which will come in especially handy during long meetings (and when you have teammates who tend to go off-topic).
User Story Map Framework
Popularized by Jeff Patton in 2005, the user story mapping technique is an agile way to manage product backlogs. Whether you’re working alone or with a product team, you can leverage user story mapping to plan product releases. User story maps help teams stay focused on the business value and release features that customers care about. The framework helps to get a shared understanding for the cross-functional team of what needs to be done to satisfy customers' needs.
Meeting
Everyone has been in a meeting that didn’t go as planned. Maybe it ran off course, or you ran out of time to accomplish everything you set out to do -- or maybe it just felt like a waste of time. To avoid that, it’s important to prepare to run a team meeting ahead of time. With this simple but effective template, you can prepare to run a team meeting that ticks all the boxes. By creating a streamlined way to build preparation into your workflow, you’ll ensure your meetings are efficient, enjoyable, and collaborative.
Workflow
The digital world requires collaboration, and better collaboration leads to better results. A workflow is a project management tool that allows you to sketch out the various steps, resources, timeline and roles necessary to complete a project. It can be used on any multi-step project, whether it’s a business process or otherwise, and is ideal for plotting out the tangible actions you’ll need to take to achieve a goal and the order in which you need to complete those actions.
Dot Voting
Dot voting, also known as “sticker voting,” “dotmocracy,” or “voting with dots”, allows teams to point out issues in a series of potential solutions or to prioritize tasks when presented with various options. Dot voting is different from the default “one-share” or “one-vote” rule. Instead, each person in the group is given as many votes (or “points”) as can be filled. Those votes can either all be cast for one idea, or distributed among many ideas. You can use dot voting any time your team prioritizes options or agrees on a direction to take for a high-stakes project.
Stickies Packs
Sticky notes are a popular feature of any virtual, hybrid, or in-person brainstorming session. Participants can use sticky notes to submit, sort, or vote for ideas -- and much more. Use the Stickies Packs template to customize groups of sticky notes for your participants. You can then break your participants into groups according to the color of their sticky notes, or categorize ideas based on color, and so on. The Stickies Packs template empowers you to create brainstorming sessions that fit your needs and align with your goals.
SMART Goals
Setting goals can be encouraging, but can also be overwhelming. It can be hard to conceptualize every step you need to take to achieve a goal, which makes it easy to set goals that are too broad or too much of a stretch. SMART is a framework that allows you to establish goals in a way that sets you up for success. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. If you keep these attributes in mind whenever you set goals, then you’ll ensure your objectives are clear and reachable. Your team can use the SMART model anytime you want to set goals. You can also use SMART whenever you want to reevaluate and refine those goals.
Outcome Mapping
Large, complex projects have plenty of inherent uncertainty — and can have a lot of possible outcomes. How can you be ready for them all? You can anticipate them. Outcome Mapping is a technique that lets you gather information ahead of time to prepare for the many changes and unforeseen obstacles that arise during a project. This template makes it easy for you to conduct Outcome Mapping in four steps: doing your pre-work, providing a framework for monitoring, developing an evaluation plan, and circulating it to your team and stakeholders.
Timeline
A timeline displays a chronological order of important dates, and scheduled events. Timelines help product managers, project managers, and team members tell visual stories about progress and obstacles. Timelines enable teams to see at a glance what happened before, what progress is happening now, and what needs tackling in the future. Projects or products with specific purpose or deliverables should be based on a timeline to be successful. Use the timeline as a shared reference for start dates, end dates, and milestones.
Project Canvas
A project canvas is a management tool that helps you summarize, visualize, and share all necessary information about your project. It can be used by all team members—from facilitators to project management professionals—at every stage of project development. The project canvas template allows you to keep all stakeholders in the project development process in the loop. By using a single platform for all project-related discussions, you can build a clear project overview and improve collaboration.
Timeline Workflow
A timeline is a visual tool that chronologically plots out projects step by step. It’s an ideal tool for your team to tell stories (such as an overview of events in your organization) and visualize your projects or processes. The Timeline Workflow template is perfect for any project that relies on visual content. You may find it beneficial to use with your team and also to share with other stakeholders or clients to keep them in the loop on your progress.
Project Charter
Project managers rely on project charters as a source of truth for the details of a project. Project charters explain the core objectives, scope, team members and more involved in a project. For an organized project management, charters can be useful to align everyone around a shared understanding of the objectives, strategies and deliverables for a project of any scope. This template ensures that you document all aspects of a project so all stakeholders are informed and on the same page. Always know where your project is going, its purpose, and its scope.
Communications Plan
You saw the opportunity. You developed the product. Now comes an important step: Find your audience and speak to them in a way that’s clear, memorable, and inspiring. You need a communications plan—a strategy for controlling your narrative at every stage of your business—and this template will help you create a good one. No need to build a new strategy every time you have something to communicate. Here, you can simplify the process, streamline your messaging, and empower you to communicate in ways that grow with your business.
Bang for the Buck
The name pretty much says it—this Agile framework is all about helping you maximize efficiency by powering collaboration between product managers and dev teams. Together you can go over each to-do on the project agenda and evaluate them in terms of costs and benefits. That way you can prioritize tasks based on how much bang for your buck they deliver. This template is great for teams and organizations that want to make a strategic plan to tackle an upcoming sprint.
To-do List
To-do lists are simple, yet effective tools that can break down large tasks into smaller, concrete steps. They can range from individual daily tasks to broader group goals. You can make a to-do list for any project or deliverable that your team is responsible for. Breaking down tasks into concrete steps helps your team reach your goals with ease. With the To-Do List template, you can customize your to-do list to include photos, images, videos, color-coding, and documents.
SIPOC
A SIPOC diagram maps a process at a high level by identifying the potential gaps between suppliers and input specifications and between customers and output specifications, and thereby defines the scope of process improvement activities. The acronym SIPOC stands for Suppliers (sources), Input, Process, Output, and Customers. SIPOC identifies feedback and feed-forward loops between customers, suppliers, and the processes, and jump-starts the team to think in terms of cause and effect. Use this visual tool to document the working process from beginning to end.
Project Proposal
For any type of project, the Project Proposal template can be a crucial step toward clarifying the context, goals, and scope of a project to get stakeholder buy-in. A project proposal outlines what you want to accomplish, your goals, and how you plan to achieve them. Generally, a project proposal gives the reader some context on the project, explains why it is important, and lists the actions that you will take to complete it. Project proposals have myriad uses. Often, businesses use project proposals to get external buy-in from a donor or outside stakeholder. But many companies draw up project proposals for internal buy-in too.
Production Workflow
Whether you’re producing a podcast, a marketing campaign, a TV show, or a piece of content, establishing a production workflow is crucial. A production workflow creates a visual guide to the different steps in a process. It can be used to train new team members or give a high-level overview to stakeholders. Although production workflows vary by team and business, they generally contain information about who the stakeholders are, how you brainstorm ideas, what your timeline looks like, and what resources you need to succeed.
Milestone Chart
When your team is collaborating on a large project, keeping track of the many tasks and multiple timelines can be a challenge. That’s why you need a milestone chart. These visual representations of important project events will make it simple for your team to stay on schedule and reach goals on time. And it’s so easy to get started — just determine the major milestones, use our template to create a milestone chart, and define the key dates and deliverables each milestone will require.
HEART
Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, and Task Success. Those are the pillars of user experience — which is why they serve as the key metrics in the HEART framework. Developed by the research team at Google, this framework gives larger companies an accurate way to measure user experience at scale, which you can then reference throughout the product development lifecycle. While the HEART framework uses five metrics, you might not need all five for every project — choose the ones that will be most useful for your company and project.
Executive Summary
Pique their curiosity. Get them excited. Inspire them to keep reading, diving further into your proposal details. That’s what a good executive summary has the power to do—and why it’s a crucial opening statement for business plans, project plans, investment proposals, and more. Use this template to create an executive summary that starts building belief, by answering high-level questions that include: What is your project? What are the goals? How will you bring your skills and resources to the project? And who can expect to benefit?
Event Planning
Whether you’re planning a product launch, fully remote conference, or milestone event, the Event Planning Template will act as a visual checklist and map for all the details you need to consider before the big day. The Event Planning Template is an adaptable way to make sure the creative and strategic vision of your event doesn’t get lost in the details. By mapping out different sections - from the marketing plan, to the agenda, to snacks and swag for guests — you and your team can focus on the details most important to your functions, and collaborate as needed when overlaps occur.
Work Plan
A work plan is essentially a roadmap for a project. It articulates the steps you must take to achieve the desired goal, sets demonstrable objectives, and establishes measurable deliverables. An effective work plan guides you throughout the project lifecycle, allowing you to realize an outcome by collaborating with your team. Although work plans vary, they generally contain four core components: goals, strategy, tactics, and deliverables.
Work Breakdown Structure
A work breakdown is a project management tool that lays out everything you must accomplish to complete a project. It organizes these tasks into multiple levels and displays each element graphically. Creating a work breakdown is a deliverable-based approach, meaning you’ll end up with a detailed project plan of the deliverables you must create to finish the job. Create a Work Breakdown Structure when you need to deconstruct your team's work into smaller, well-defined elements to make it more manageable.
Status Report
A status report provides a snapshot of how something is going at a given time. You can provide a status report for a project, a team, or a situation, as long as it emphasizes and maps out a project’s chain of events. If you’re a project manager, you can use this report to keep historical records of project timelines. Ideally, any project stakeholder should be able to look at a status report and answer the question, “Where are we, and how did we get here?” Use this template as a starting point to summarize how something is progressing against a projected plan or outcome.
STAR
STAR is a framework that stands for Situation, Task, Action, Result. Use this strategy to answer interview questions with concrete examples to show that you have the skills and experience you need. Many hiring managers or interviewer panels will ask prospective employees competency-based questions such as, “Tell me about a time when you …” or “Share an example of a situation where. …” If you’re an employer, you can use STAR to clarify with your team what skills and personality traits make someone a successful, high-level performer.
Stakeholder Analysis
Managing stakeholders is integral to completing a project on time and meeting expectations, so here’s how to use a stakeholder analysis to help. A stakeholder analysis empowers you to meet expectations and complete projects on time by identifying individuals, groups, and organizations with a vested interest in a program or process. In a typical stakeholder analysis, you’ll prioritize stakeholders based on their influence on a project and seek to understand how best to interface with them throughout the course of the project.
Simple Project Plan
A simple project is a North Star for your team, helping them answer any big questions about the project. The project plan should describe the nature of the plan, why you’re doing it, how you’ll make it happen, how you’ll carry out each step of the process, and how long each step is projected to take. If you’re a project manager or team lead, use this template to start a simple project plan, which can then be adapted to suit internal team projects or external client partner projects.
Scenario Mapping
Scenario mapping is the process of outlining all the steps a user will take to complete a task. The scenario mapping template helps you create a visual guide to what different personas are doing, thinking, and feeling in different situations. Use scenario mapping to outline an intended or ideal scenario (what should happen) as well as what currently happens. If you’re trying to outline the ideal scenario, user mapping should take place very early on in a project and can help inform user stories and the product backlog. If you’re just trying to get a better sense of what currently happens, you can do user mapping when conducting user interviews or observation.
Risk Assessment
A risk assessment matrix is a simple framework you can use to plan your project or product development cycle. Also known as a probability and severity risk matrix, the framework can enable you to figure out how to prioritize project or product-related risks based on likelihood and potential business impact. Risks can be ranked according to low probability and severity (1, color-coded green) to the highest possible likelihood (10, color-coded red). Ranking each risk lets you and your team prioritize risks and tackle the biggest threats with a strong action plan. The grid format allows you to control the amount of risk you’re likely to face during the project by visualizing and qualifying it.
RICE Prioritization
When developing a product roadmap, it can be easy to get lost in the weeds. RICE, which stands for Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort, helps you evaluate and prioritize ideas. Brainstorming new ways to delight your customers can be rewarding, but it can also be overwhelming. You and your team might be tempted to dive into the most exciting ideas first, without taking into account the potential lift. The RICE framework allows your team to carefully consider each potential project and assess its feasibility.
RAID Log
A RAID log is a project planning tool that focuses on four key areas: risks, assumptions, issues, and dependencies. Risks are events that could have an adverse effect if they occur, assumptions are things you assume will happen to contribute to the project’s success (and that will have negative consequences if they don’t occur), issues are risks that have already occurred and had a negative impact on the project, and dependencies are things that must start or finish so your project can progress. RAID logs are often used when beginning a new project, but they’re also useful for promoting alignment and sharing status for projects that are already underway.
Project Status Report
A project status report is a short, timely document that keeps your project stakeholders informed and aligned on what is happening, and why. You can start writing this document on your own, then include your teammates as well to produce a timely and relevant report. A project status report should ideally compare the current state of your project against its projected plan. The report tracks on a high level how you achieve your goals, even if you experience setbacks. It’s also likely to be read by an executive-level audience controlling budgets and governance, which can help you keep the report focused on critical issues.
Project Scope
A project scope helps you plan and confirm your project’s goals, deliverables, features, functions, tasks, costs, and deadlines. A project manager and team should develop a project scope as early as possible, as it will directly influence both the schedule and cost of a project as it progresses. Though project scopes will vary depending on your team and objectives, they generally include goals, requirements, major deliverables, assumptions, and constraints. Aim to include the whole team when you create a project scope to ensure everyone is aligned on responsibilities and deadlines.
Project Planning
A project plan is a single source of truth that helps teams visualize and reach project milestones. Project plans are most useful when you outline the project’s “what” and “why” to anyone who needs to give you project buy-in. Use a project plan to proactively discuss team needs; expectations; and baselines for timeline, budget, and scope. The plan will also help you clarify available resources before you kick off a project, as well as expected deliverables at the end of the project.
Project Kickoff
A project kick-off helps set the vision and scope of team assignments. Different stakeholders often need to be involved, such as management, project managers, and the project team. The kick-off helps establish communication and finalize timelines. They can take place after initiation of smaller projects, or when planning of larger projects is complete and execution is about to start. Use this template to set the stage for a kick-off, introduce the team and stakeholders, provide context, define the scope and timeline, and establish metrics for success.
Gap Analysis
Consider your team’s or organization’s ideal state. Now compare it to your current real-world situation. Want to identify the gaps or obstacles that stand between your present and future? Then you’re ready to run a gap analysis. This easy-to-customize template will let your team align on what obstacles are preventing you from hitting your goals sooner, collaborate on a plan to achieve those goals, and push your organization toward growth and development. You can focus on specific gap analyses — including for skills, candidates, software, processes, vendors, data, and more.
Corrective Action Plan
For a manager or HR leader, it’s the least fun part of the job: Documenting an employee’s performance issues and talking about them directly to that employee. A corrective action plan makes that tough task a little easier by putting issues into a professional, written framework. That way the process, next steps, and details of the conversations are all clearly documented. This template will enable you to eliminate murky communication, align on expectations, and provide step-by-step instructions for your employee.
Agenda
Even when you’ve hosted meetings for years, hosting them online is something altogether different. Keeping them structured, purposeful, and on-task is key. That all starts with having a detailed agenda, and this template makes it so easy for you to create one. The best part? Agendas are often dry and boring—but not here. We make it easy for you to sprinkle in your choice of graphics, colors, fonts, and images to give your agenda personality and creative style.
Project Organizational Chart
When you’re embarking on a long, complex project, you will inevitably hit roadblocks and obstacles. It’s important to have your project organizational chart on hand to overcome those challenges. A project organizational chart is a visual diagram that illustrates who is on your team and the role they play in a given project. It documents the structure of the project organization, the hierarchy between team members, and the relationships between employees. Project organizational charts are useful tools for clarifying who does what, securing buy-in, and setting expectations for the group.
Value Stream Map
Value stream mapping is a method of depicting the flow of materials and information necessary to bring a product to a customer. It’s simple: you use a series of symbols to showcase work streams and information flows, and another symbol to indicate whether those items add value. You can thereby figure out which items are not adding value from the customer’s standpoint. Value stream mapping results in better communication and collaboration. Use the value stream map template to understand knowledge gaps in handoffs between team members and across teams. An effective value stream map helps identify waste, foster collaboration, and streamline production.
Pros and Cons List
A pros and cons list is a simple but powerful decision-making tool used to help understand both sides of an argument. Pros are listed as arguments in favor of making a particular decision or action. Cons are listed arguments against it. By creating a list that details both sides of the argument, it becomes easier to visualize the potential impact of your decision. To make your pros and cons list even more objective, it can help to weight each pro and con against the others. You can then present your decision with confidence, making a strong argument for why it’s the right one.
Bull's Eye Diagram
When you’re a growing organization, every decision can feel like it has make-or-break consequences—which can lead to decision paralysis, an inability to prioritize, inefficient meetings, and even low morale. If that sounds like you, put a Bull’s Eye Diagram to work. True to its name, a Bull’s Eye Diagram uses a model of concentric circles to help companies establish priorities, make critical decisions, or discuss how to remove or overcome obstacles.
Burndown Chart
Whoa whoa whoa, pace yourself! That means knowing how much work is left—and, based on the delivery date, how much time you’ll have for each task. Perfect for project managers, Burndown Charts create a clear visualization of a team’s remaining work to help get it done on time and on budget. These charts have other big benefits, too. They encourage transparency and help individual team members be aware of their work pace so they can adjust or maintain it.
Gantt Chart
Simplicity, clarity, and power — that’s what make Gantt charts such a popular choice for organizing and displaying a project plan. Built upon a horizontal bar that represents the project progress over time, these charts break down projects by task, allowing the whole team to see the task status, who it’s assigned to, and how long it will take to complete. Gantt charts are also easily shareable among team members and stakeholders, making them great tools for collaboration.
Impact/Effort Matrix
Growing organizations have countless to-do’s and only so many hours in a day (or weeks before a big launch) to get them done. That’s where an impact effort matrix comes in. It gives you a quick visual guide to help prioritize your tasks and know exactly what’s worth doing. Using our template, you can create a matrix that organizes your activities into four main categories: quick wins that are low effort, effort-intensive projects that provide long-term returns, fill-ins that are low effort but low value, and time-wasters.
UX Project Canvas
Inspired by Alexander Osterwalder's 2005 business model canvas, the project canvas will help your team visualize the big picture of your UX and design projects, providing a convenient structure that holds all of your important data. This innovative tool enables you to transform an idea into a project plan, stimulating collaboration and communication between collaborators. Unlike alternative models, the project canvas is a simple interface. There are few startup costs, and employees can easily be brought up to speed to start using the canvas quickly.
Venn Diagram
Venn Diagrams have been a staple of business meetings and presentations since the 1800s, and there’s a good reason why. Venn diagrams provide a clear, effective way to visually showcase relationships between datasets. They serve as a helpful visual aid in brainstorming sessions, meetings, and presentations. You start by drawing a circle containing one concept, and then draw an overlapping circle containing another concept. In the space where the circles overlap, you can make note of the concepts’ similarities. In the space where they do not, you can make note of their differences.
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