Good leaders know how to get more from their employees and add value to their projects. They lead the charge when times are tough and rally their troops by prioritizing organization, promoting camaraderie, and leveraging feedback.
Effective leaders are expert planners, too. They know how to create a roadmap for the future and regularly lean on pre-established project management practices.
The best project managers know how to organize their projects, as well. They lean on handy templates — like scrum task boards and communication plans — that boost their team’s productivity, improve cross-departmental collaboration, and keep everyone on track to complete the project on time. In this article, we’ll cover project templates that should be part of every manager’s toolkit.
Kanban Template
Kanban is the king of workflow management and productivity management. The Kanban method was first used at Toyota, the car manufacturing giant, where Kanban boards were used to visualize the stages of production and improve day-to-day productivity.
Project managers can use a Kanban Board to delegate tasks, improve accountability, and identify bottlenecks in the production process. A neatly organized Kanban board can also help project managers keep track of projects that are overdue and/or backlogged and in need of extra attention.
Today, popular project management software like Asana uses the Kanban Board template to organize remote teams. Folks simply have to log on to the software to see the status of their projects and compare their progress to their peers. This can improve employees’ understanding of their roles and foster greater collaboration between teams.
Scrum Task Board
Scrum task boards are similar to Kanban Boards. However, scrum task boards can be customized and adapted to meet the needs of more complex projects. Team members can add their insights directly to the scrum board and can add notes that help everyone else understand the progress of the project.
Scrum task boards are updated a little more frequently than Kanban boards, too. This can be particularly useful for collaborative teams that need to understand the progress their peers have made. Organizations like software developers and game studios often use scrum task boards to improve cross-department communication and ensure that everyone is working with the same information.
Project Status Report
A project status report template can help project managers and team members add key detail to the progress of a particular project. This is particularly important in fields like engineering and construction, where managers need to account for risks and issues as they arise.
An effective project status report can also help project managers:
- Outline the status of key project elements;
- Communicate with stakeholders;
- Identify issues as they arise.
A well-maintained project status report board can reduce the need for time-intensive meetings and ensures that all stakeholders are kept in the loop around the clock.
Communication Plan
A communication plan is essential for any business that has multiple stakeholders. A clear communication plan is particularly important for project managers that have high-profile clients who require semi-regular contact.
An effective communication plan can improve internal communication, too. Project managers can use a communication plan template to:
- Identify the stakeholders who need to be informed regularly;
- Visualize incoming data from multiple sources;
- Improve knowledge management by linking the plan to external sources.
Put simply, any project manager who deals with multiple stakeholders will benefit from the clarity and visualization that a well-wrought communication plan can bring.
Year Product Roadmap
A product launch is a big deal for any company. However, actually releasing a new product on time is all but impossible without an effective year product roadmap template. A year-long product roadmap guides the project from Q1 to Q4 and details every step from idea generation to soft launches.
A year product roadmap can help businesses respond to setbacks and challenges, too. When working on the product roadmap, project managers can see tasks that are lagging behind or are at risk of spilling over into the next quarter. This can be accounted for by increasing slack at a later date by pushing back a release or contacting clients early to notify them that their product will be delayed.
A year product roadmap can help project managers delegate tasks and shift resources. This is particularly important for big-budget projects on a tight timeline. Rather than accepting a delay, project managers who use the year product roadmap can spot issues and allocate more employees to a particular task if needed.
Project Need Breakdown
A project need breakdown chart is a type of tree diagram, or dendrogram, that lists “needs” in a hierarchical structure. This type of diagram can help project managers understand the “big-picture” of a particular project and see a list of resources necessary to complete the project.
Project need breakdown charts can be scalable to any business size, too. Sole priorities, like carpenters or mechanics, can use the chart to visualize the list of equipment and supplies they need. Similarly, multinational corporations can use the project need breakdown diagram to identify the resources — like labor and materials — that they’ll need to release a new product next year.
Conclusion
A well-organized project management chart can help improve productivity and iron-out organizational issues. Even simple charts, like a communication plan, can keep staff accountable, improve interdepartmental collaboration, and reduce the amount of time that project managers spend in meetings.
Image source:Unsplash
