Within a project, templates for common communications, like reminder emails, meeting agendas, and progress reports, can save you a lot of time. Across projects, templates for common project management activities can support efficiency and help your team or organization develop a consistent project workflow.

How can you determine which templates to create?

• Identify existing templates: Don’t recreate the wheel! Ask your project managers and team members if there are templates they are already using that you can share across projects and teams.

• Consider your common project activities and workflow: If there are activities that you do for almost every project, those activities are a part of your organization or team’s project workflow. Which templates might be useful to you in supporting these common activities?

• Consider compliance needs: Are there quality measures, policies, regulations, standards, or funding requirements with which many of your projects or project deliverables must comply? These compliance needs might become part of a project monitoring or reporting template, such as a safety checklist or quality assessment rubric.

• Conduct or review project retrospectives: Project retrospectives allow project managers to capture information about lessons learned throughout their projects. Reviewing these lessons may reveal common pain points in projects where a template might help.

For ideas about templates to create for your organization, download our Project Templates List and review our guides and resources.

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