In the era of digital business, leading teams through projects can be challenging without proper planning. It can often feel like you are trying to guide people through different types of working, constantly changing conditions, and limited visibility and resources—because this is really how it is. If planning deficiencies exist, they will only become more magnified as complexity and the need for speed increase, something that is guaranteed to continue happening in today’s world of work. Today, planning processes must be integrated and continuous so that you have the ability to adjust and react to new information as well as take advantage of emerging opportunities. However, reaching the point of continuous planning can be rather difficult, a challenge that the right project plan template can mitigate.
Before we jump into the project plan templates, let’s first take a closer look at what planning really is. By definition:
“The goal of planning is to ensure that the organization is executing on its strategy by making the right investment decisions and continuously aligning these with their strategic goals, financial constraints, and resource capacity.”
In simpler terms, plans must be dynamic, as they must allow organizations to shift based on the latest data, while still keeping resources aligned and mapped to outcome delivery at all times. This flexibility is key to effective planning processes, as it feeds the ability to connect strategy to delivery.
Now that you understand more about the benefits of continuous and dynamic planning (for more information on types of planning, download the eBook, “Planning Deconstructed”), let’s dive into just how you can get started by analyzing various different project plan templates.
Find the project plan template perfect for you.
If you follow along with our blog, you may remember our previous posts on each individual project plan template outlined below. If not feel free to click through the links to receive greater detail on the project plan template of your choosing.
We kicked off this series of use cases for the templates with the post “Introduction to the Workspace Template Library.” This post provides an overview of each of the below use cases, which we will now go into in greater detail.
- Public Relations. With one collaborative workspace to get work done, you achieve these advantages:
- Communicate directly with task owners on specific activities and provide the whole team with a line of sight into accountability for individual tasks.
- It’s easy to see status reports because team members can easily view what has been done and where the bottlenecks are.
- Standardizing processes. Having a checklist feature allows for the creation of standardized tasks for an assignment without having an overwhelming number of cards.
- Human Resources. Those in Human Resources may not often be considered project managers, but they are. They’re “accidental project managers” who are always looking for new ways to improve work efficiency. Using Kanban board for planning allows teams to create a workflow and identify all the steps that must be completed, for example, before a new hire’s first day, to the end of their first week of work.
- Blog Management. Having a view into each person’s workload, as well as the progress of each blog is invaluable, but the greatest feature of a single collaboration tool would have to be the ability to keep all communication about a specific piece of content in one place. Cards and Kanban boards eliminate the need for email and spreadsheets entirely, two things that are not at all missed.
- Cross-Department Communication [Interview]. Being able to break out tasks into cards on a Kanban board is the one thing that helps improve cross-department communications the most. It helps everyone in the workspace see who owns what—and it creates accountability.
- Demand Generation Marketing. Having a clear view of upcoming tasks and campaigns is often difficult, but with a consolidated collaboration tool, it’s easy to plan out email sends. Calendar views help when planning resends and creating consistency in emails, without overwhelming an audience.
- Event Management. The nature of event management involves a lot of moving parts and trying to keep track of everything can be complicated and challenging. However, collaborative work management simplifies the process by taking all of the moving parts and bringing them together in one centralized, organized, collective location.
- Digital Marketing. Without effective collaborative work management, there is a lack of visibility that makes coordination and communication difficult. With the right tool, planning for each sprint is simple, and the ability to plan out subtasks beneath each larger task keeps everything organized and easy to find.
- Customer Renewals. Easily organize key information for a customer on a “card” on a virtual task Kanban board and effortlessly attach documents, links, status updates, and more to each card.
- RFP Project Planning. The request for proposal (RFP) process often require collecting answers from multiple subject matter experts to produce a complete deliverable to the prospect, and this project planning can get messy, fast. However, the right collaboration solution makes the process much smoother and allows for work in progress to be easily visualized.
- Sales Team Collaboration. Sales professionals often face team collaboration challenges—they want information at their fingertips, fast, and when they need it. CWM tools improve processes through collaboration and social conversation features, plus much more.
- Customer Experience. Collaborative work management makes everything more efficient by providing the ability to track projects, assign tasks, and upload documents that can be edited, all in one place.
- Solutions Marketing. With the right CWM tool, team members have access to the most up-to-date documents, as all edits and comments are saved on a single card on a Kanban board.
- Sales Project management. There are many moving parts in each sale and with that comes factors that can be miscommunicated or confused. Collaborative work management simplifies the process by improving sales project management, enterprise sales leadership team meetings, and regional customer user groups.
To investigate the templates further, register for the on-demand webcast, Jumpstart Your Planning with the ProjectPlace Template Library, then be sure to sign up for a free trial so you can discover the perfect project fit for you and your organization.
