Project Templatesmail_outline


Project templates help you kick off projects easily with little effort, saving you time and reducing the potential for human error. Use project templates to pre-populate tasks, proofs, tags, assigned team members, and so much more! 

Project templates can also be incorporated into your team's request forms, making it incredibly simple to map the correct template to each request. Want to discuss adding project templates into your request forms? Contact us!

This guide covers some best practices to help you make the most of this feature and get your projects up and running faster. We'll be using a sample project template for print ads, but you can use templates for any type of work.

Getting Started with Project Templates

Users with the "Manage Templates" permission can create, edit, and publish project templates. Navigate to the Templates page from the left sidebar, then Projects, to manage project templates for your team.

Until they're published, all project templates will be saved as a draft.

To create a new project template, click Add Template, name it, then click Create Template.


The project template builder is similar to the standard project details view; you can create tasks, proofs, and work groups, as well as edit the description, members, tags, and custom fields in the right sidebar.

Once you've built out your project template, click Publish Template to make it available in your team's account. New projects created from the template will pre-populate everything you've incorporated.

If there's a project you've already built that you'd like to use as a framework for future projects, you can easily turn it into a project template! Open the action menu on the project details view and click Publish as Template to copy the project information, assignments, tasks, and proofs.


Adding Dependencies*

*Available only to Business & Enterprise Customers

One of the most powerful things you can build into project templates is dependencies. Dependencies let you add blockers to work items, so team members are notified when all blockers are completed and work is ready to begin.

In this example, we've added dependencies for several tasks, starting with the third item in our "Concepting & Design" workgroup, which will now be automatically created whenever a new project is built from this template.

Assigning Specialties*

*Available only to Business & Enterprise Customers

In the details section of your project template, click the plus icon below Members and select the plus icon to the right of SPECIALTIES to add specialties placeholders to the template. 


Select the plus icon next to the specialty needed. Once a specialty has been added, a number 1 and minus icon will appear. Add the number of team members needed with this specialty.


If you have a team member who fills a specific specialty you can assign them from the template by clicking the specialty and selecting their name. Specialties can later be updated at the project level.


Now that you have the appropriate specialties assigned to the project, begin adding specialties to your work items. Click the plus icon and select the specialty or specialties needed. 

 

Assigning Team Members

We can assign team members at the project template level if we know we'll always have the same people working on a certain type of task.

In our example, we have one print designer, so we already know we'll want to route all print design tasks to her. We've added her as a member to all related tasks. And if we also want to assign additional members who won't necessarily be involved with individual tasks, we can add them at the project level.


Adding members from the project template also ensures that your teammates get notified when proofs are returned.

Adding Tags

Tags are system-wide fields that can help categorize and filter project, task, and proof data by things like brand, department, or client name. By adding tags into your project templates, you'll have them automatically applied to tasks, proofs and the project, streamlining the setup process.

In this example, it's important to our team to be able to report on how much time is spent on creative work vs. administrative work, so you can see we've added "CREATIVE" and "ADMIN" tags to our tasks. We also want to be able to track how many print projects we're working on, so we've added "PRINT" as a tag at the project level.

By adding tags up front in the project template, it saves our project manager quite a bit of time from having to manually add them every time a new project is created.

Changing Default Custom Fields*

*Available only to Business & Enterprise Customers

Custom fields enable you to add unique fields to projects in order to search for and report on valuable project details that are unique to your process and business.

In our example, we have a custom field dropdown to choose which department is involved with the project. This type of project will always be assigned to our Creative team, so we're setting it to pre-populate as "Creative" in the template.

Another way you could use default custom fields is to set a project owner, if the same person will always be responsible for certain type of project. 

Adding Level of Effort 

Select a work item and click Add LOE to begin adding level of effort.


Input the number of hours and/or minutes below LEVEL OF EFFORT. If you have users assigned to your template, the hours will be evenly distributed. 


You can redistribute how the hours are allocated by clicking  Allocated To and selecting Totals To from the dropdown menu. 


Input the number of hours and/or minutes for each user below LEVEL OF EFFORT. These numbers will automatically update the overall level of effort. Select Save when complete. 


Changing Default Work Status*

*Available only to Business & Enterprise Customers

By default, new projects have the status of "To Do", but you can change the default to another work status, including a custom work status.

In our example, if we want to immediately kick off all print ad projects into our custom status called "Concepting", we can set that as the default in this project template.

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