Project templates are a staple of efficient business processes. Project templates give your work structure: they ease the start of any new project and guide you through the execution of your work.
A good project management template should also help improve your workflow; the more you use it, the more you can identify bottlenecks, fine-tune your processes, and improve your template.
Project management templates don’t need to be complicated, either. Whether it’s excel templates, kanban board, or one of Gryffin’s automated templates, a basic project management template can go a long way to improving your efficiency.
The Benefits of Creating a Project Template
As if improving your workflows wasn’t enough, here are a few additional ways templates can help you with managing a project:
- Using the same template over and over reduces the chance you’ll forget an important detail.
- It provides consistency to your project by ensuring all steps will be performed according to previously established guidelines.
- It’s based on the best practices that can be tested again and again.
- Using a template for a new type of project will help decrease the learning curve.
- It will improve resource management since you will know from the start exactly what will be needed to go into each project.
- Your project template can also help you determine the project schedule—decreasing scope creep when dealing with clients!
- In the same vein, a template can help you keep an eye on your project budget.
In short, project templates save you time and money!
The Building Blocks of a Basic Project Management Template
For simple projects, you might only need the track the essentials:
- Who is the project for? (You? A team member? A client?)
- When is the due date? (Alternatively, when are the start and end dates?)
- Who is going to do the work? What will they do?
- Does the project belong to a more extensive body of work?
- What are the tasks needed to complete this project?
- What information do you need about each task?
- Does this project repeat itself?
Build A Basic Project Management Template with Gryffin
You can build a project management template yourself using tools like Google Sheets, Trello, or Asana…
But why bother, when you get one pre-built with Gryffin?
With Gryffin you get a library of purpose-built templates that can be installed in seconds.
You can install our basic project management template to track any kind of work or install one of our marketing templates to tackle projects…
- Content marketing
- Graphic design
- Local SEO
- On-page optimization
- Blogger or media outreach
- Influencer campaigns
…and so much more.
Every template comes with a Workspace, where you can create projects that will follow your template. By grouping them together, you can see the project status of multiple projects at a glance. If you’re working on a lot of projects at once, or need to quickly scale the number of projects you’re working on at one time, Gryffin has you covered.
When you click on any project, it will open up your Project Hub, where you can get an overview of all the goings-on of that particular project: files, tasks, emails, chats, and more.
You also get Automated Tasks which will guide you through the project, step-by-step.
As soon as you create a project, you will get your first task(s). Once those are marked done, you will automatically get your next set of tasks. This is known as a Workflow. As you can see in the image above, a basic workflow has the steps:
- Pending
- In Progress
- Under Review
- Pending Edits
- Completed
Go Beyond Basic
Want to take your basic project template to the next level? Maybe you want to customize your template fields or add a new stage or task to your workflow. With Gryffin, it’s easy!
In your Workspace, open the menu and click Configure Workspace.
On the Configure Workspace page, you’ll be able to edit your template settings, fields, and workflows.
Click the Template tab to customize the fields that appear in your Project Hub. You can drag and drop different field types from the left column onto your template on the right.
You can add as many fields as you want, as well as rearrange or remove fields. Change the name of the field to suit your needs. You can also further customize some fields by clicking the 
button.
Have a Look at Gryffin’s Template Library
When it comes to building project templates, Gryffin is the best and most comprehensive platform around. With our extensive template library, you don’t have to worry about the time and resources it takes to adopt a new project management software. Simply find the project template you want, click install, and you’re ready to hit the ground running!
Want to see it in action? Check out our video — or see it for yourself by signing up today! You can use any of Gryffin’s templates (and get access to additional features like time tracking and billing!) when you start your free trial.
[arve url=”https://vimeo.com/353880666″ title=”From Templates to Tasks” description=”See how easy it is to install a new template and start creating projects with automated tasks.” upload_date=”2019-08-14″ thumbnail=”https://i.vimeocdn.com/video/806203362_640.webp” /]