Hello, and welcome to our Impactful Projects and Planning Microtraining Series. I'm Jami Yazdani. In today's session, we'll talk about saving time and creating consistency across projects by using templates. So one of the questions I'm often asked when I train folks on project management strategies is some version of how can I juggle a project or multiple projects on top of everything else I already have on my plate. And so something I often suggest is creating and using templates. So within a project, templates for common communications, like reminder emails and meeting agendas and 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. So which templates are really essential, you know? Which templates are going to help us save more time? So as project managers, we often spend a significant portion of our time communicating with our teams and stakeholders. So creating templates for your most common communications can be a great place to start and will likely save you the most effort. So the templates I often create for most projects are reminder emails. So I often follow up with team members or stakeholders to ensure they are on track for task completion. So a simple reminder template email, where I can pop in a task and a due date is really helpful. For a current project, I've been sending weekly emails to all of our team members with a list of upcoming due dates for tasks. Those tasks are linked to our project management tools so that they can make sure they're marking their tasks complete when they're done. And so I have a templates, template, for this email that just makes it easy for me to send. And while you may not be sending reminder emails, many project management or task tracker tools will send out notifications automatically. So setting those up can also save you time. I also tend to create a progress report template or a report slide deck so that I can easily pop in current information about the status or progress of project activities. So I found that creating this template really early in a project to be most valuable, because it forces me to think through the information needs of certain stakeholders. I've also found that content from a progress report may be something that I can pull from the more detailed information I might provide to team members in another type of communication. So often, one template might help me create multiple communications. Another really useful communications template is for meeting agendas. If you meet with your project team or key stakeholders regularly, create a standard agenda and make minor tweaks as needed. So creating and using an agenda can really help keep your meetings on track, which in itself can be another time saver. So while communication templates are really helpful within a project, and can often be used across projects, Planning Templates can help us plan for and lead multiple projects. So one template I recommend creating is a project roles list. And so identifying our stakeholders and getting really clear about the roles that are going to play in our projects is critical to project success. So create a list of common roles, maybe project leader or project sponsor or subject matter expert, and use that template to consider and assigned roles for each of your projects. Another really useful template is a communications plan. So I often use Who, What, How and When approach to planning my project communications. So having a worksheet or a spreadsheet to map this out for my various stakeholders can be really useful. So I think about what they need to know about a project, which format I might use to communicate with a stakeholder and how often I need to be in touch. And that can really help me plan more fully for project communications. I've also found that once I can see all of this communication information in one place, it helps me find some of those overlaps, and makes it easier to find places where I might be able to repurpose or reuse similar communication content, or just ways that I can streamline my approach. Budget templates to help you plan for your project's costs and resources are also essential to most projects. And so there are typically a couple of funding categories that may be common across your projects, like tools, supplies, people. And having those in a spreadsheet that also allows us to track our spending can save us tremendous time from project to project.

Across projects, we can also create templates to cover common activities in our project workflow. So project workflows are really about creating a consistent approach to managing projects across your team or your organization. And so if there are activities that we do for most every project, those activities become part of our project workflow. And these are really ripe opportunity for creating and using templates. Now, I showed this in an earlier microtraining, but an example of a consistent project workflow for a mission-driven organization might include these phases or stages of project activities. So project approval, project planning, project interactions or execution, project monitoring, and project closing. So we've talked about communication and planning templates, which would likely support many of the activities in our project planning and interaction stages. But what about project approval, project monitoring, project closing? What templates might be useful to us in those stages? So at the project approval stage, you can create and use a project approval form to capture consistent information about prospective projects. This is going to allow your leadership to make more informed decisions about which projects to pursue. The other benefit of this form or template is that the information that you gather here can also be used to start planning on those approved projects. Now for project monitoring, if there are standards or quality measures that are commonly used to assess your project's deliverables or outcomes, those can be used to create a quality assessment template. Now, this could be a simple checklist, it could be a rubric. But the whole role here is to help project managers and team members determine how our project deliverables meet whatever standards, criteri,a regulations that you find you commonly need to meet in a project. Now, if you typically assess quality by gathering user or stakeholder feedback, which is often common in mission-driven organizations, maybe you can have some sample surveys or a template of forum questions that could be shared with your team as well. Similarly, at project closing, we might want to create a project retrospective worksheet to allow project managers to capture information about lessons learned throughout their project. I've often found that project closing tends to be neglected in mission-driven organizations, but I think it's neglected in a lot of organizations, often because our teams and stakeholders have moved on to other projects or moved back to all of the things they already have on their plate. So having a simple template that folks can use at the end of their projects to really gather some information about what went well and what didn't might encourage our teams to conduct these retrospectives - your project managers aren't going to have to come up with it themselves. And so using a consistent approach here, for project retrospectives or debriefs, and documenting what folks have learned across projects, can allow us to improve our organization's approach to managing teams and projects. And it may even help us discover which templates might need be most useful for our organization. So our goal with templates and workflows is to save time. There is no need to reinvent the wheel with each new project, or report or plan or communication. Taking the time to develop templates will save you and your team time in the long run, time and effort that you can use and put to work creating successful project outcomes and results. So for a list of our recommended templates, you can check out our Project Templates List. So this free download can help you consider which templates to create and use in developing your own project workflows. And it's available at yazdaniconsulting.com/resources. There are also a lot of other templates available, on our website at that same link. We've got planning checklists, role guides, meeting agendas, project retrospective worksheets, that can, that you can start using right away or that you can start to develop your own templates that are going to work for your organization. If you need more hands on support leading projects and teams or creating templates or workflows for your organization, visit our project solutions page at yazdaniconsulting.com/projects to learn about how we can help. All right, so I'm happy to take any questions you have about project templates. Feel free to add them in the comments. There is a little bit of a streaming delay, so I'll give folks a few moments to add their questions. If I cannot answer your question live, I'm happy to respond later in the comments. You can also find all of the ways to contact me at yazdaniconsulting.com/contact. So please reach out to me if you'd like to talk about project templates or workflows. Okay, so, "For a single project, when should I create communication templates? Before a project starts?" So there are a few communication templates I might create at the start of a project, like a progress report or a team meeting agenda template. But I often create templates for things like reminder emails as I go along in a project. So in the early days of a project, I really try to pay attention to my own tasks as the project manager, and consider whether the email or communication I just sent might also be really useful for me later. And if I think that it might be, I try to save it as a template and reuse it. Okay, so another question, "Templates can feel rigid. How much flexibility do we have to stray from a template across projects?" So I know that in some organizations, templates and project workflows or processes are used in a way that feels really constraining, because they're less about providing project managers with helpful tools and frameworks, and more about compliance. Now, with things like quality assessments or use of funding, compliance may be necessary to your project and organization. But often, many of our templates or processes really should be flexible. And I think project managers should try to tweak them as needed, though. The whole point of a template is that we can use it to save ourselves time and create something more easily that's going to work for our project. And so unless there's kind of a compliance reason, around your funding or meeting regulations, or things that are perhaps a core value in your organization, I think you should be able to use the templates really as a framework, rather than "this is 100% the way that we have to do this reminder email or this, you know, project report". Alright, so please do feel free to comment, reach out to me and message me with any additional questions that you have. So thank you for participating in our Impactful Projects and Planning Microseries. You can visit yazdaniconsulting.com/ipp to view all of the sessions in this series and learn about upcoming microtrainings. In the future, we're going to have some guests, which I'm very excited about, and so do watch this space and that page to find out who will be joining me on some of these sessions. So thank you! Enjoy the rest of your day.