It is good practice to use professional, fit for purpose project management templates when running a project.  This helps drive standardistion and reduce the risk of key activities being missed.

Many organisations have invested a lot of time and money in developing standard templates to be used across their organisations.  Unfortunately, there are many small and large organisations who do not have a defined set of standard tools.  This usually results in the following:

  • Projects do not use any tools to manage their project – likely outcome fail to deliver
  • Projects use their own tools – takes time to set up tools, makes it difficult to consolidate and report effectively, increasing chance of something being missed causing delivery problems
  • PMO has to build their own tools – good in respect of standardisation but comes with the overhead of creating the tools (in many cases one PMO will create the tools, but as they are not shared, another PMO in the same organisation will start from scratch and build their own tools)

Create your own templates

If you do not have a set of tools you can develop your own using desktop applications such as Microsoft Word and Excel.

Advantage

The advantage of this is that you can create templates that are tailored for the requirements of your business or organisation.

Using Word and Excel also means that there is no investment in additional software.  If you do not own these packages it is possible to create standard tools using free applications like Google Docs.

Disadvantage

However, creating your own is not really free as it does take time.  Therefore, it is important to consider how much time will need to be invested to create, review and update the templates until they are ready to use.

Assuming that you only want to create the absolute minimum (status report, dashboard, RAIDs log, cost tracker, benefit tracker, change control form, change control log, resource tracker, project charter), even if it takes only 2 hours a template (which is highly optimistic and does not include review and testing) this is valuable time that could be spent on mobilising the PMO and delivering the project.

It takes considerable time and money to create professional templates.  Therefore, a time and cost effective approach is to buy and customise templates from a reputable supplier.  Having a solid set of templates is particularly useful for contractors and consultants as it allows them to go into an organisation and provide immediate value.

If you are looking to fast track your mobilization activity, you should consider the comprehensive and cost effective templates below:

PM Majik: Frameworks and Templates

Members of the PM Majik Community have access to a number of powerful frameworks that include templates, guides, instructions, video tutorials and full support.

PM Majik Official Templates & Resources

  • PMO Template Framework
  • Quality Assurance Framework
  • Metrics Framework
  • Planning Workshop Framework
  • Mobilization Framework
  • PMO Manual

The resources are available in the exclusive members area and can be downloaded within minutes of completing your secure payment.

This is a great resource for new or experienced project managers.  It means that you will have your own kit bag packed with the resources and templates you need.  So you can be confident that you can react to every situation!

 

Visit PM Majik Community for more details