Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Projects need to be constantly monitored once they are underway. Tracking forms and
report templates give project owners, leaders, and customers the visibility they need to
assess the progress of the project as well as the challenges and opportunities it
currently faces. Among other things, project tracking templates help determine whether
everything is going according to plan, schedule, and budget. Project tracking and
reports also enable managers to make remedial actions well before major roadblocks
occur.
Project timelines and schedules may be created using simple tables but complex
documents with multiple variables should be built as Gantt charts instead. Such
sophisticated documents provide greater detail by showing specific milestones and their
summaries, component tasks, and deliverables, task owners, start and due dates,
dependencies, and other relevant information.
Budget management
Besides being good practice, staying within budget serves as a yardstick for
assessing a project’s health and success. Of course, it also says a lot about the
skill and resourcefulness of the project manager.
The following documents help project leaders track and manage project-related
expenses. They also enable managers to create resource allocation and cost
strategies that drive both efficiency and productivity without breaking the bank.
Such documents enable managers to set priorities, clarify role ownership, assist
struggling stakeholders, and ensure that no major roadblocks will emerge down the line.
The following templates will help you hold each member of the team accountable and
ensure that deliverables are met on time, within budget, and on par with expected
quality standards.
Good time management leads to excellent project results. It helps form a well-organized
team that runs on schedule and achieves success predictably like clockwork. So use
these templates to optimize the two most valuable resources a project has: talent and
time.
These documents will help you plan schedules, track time, and ensure that your team’s
pool of talent never goes to waste.
Things don’t always turn out as planned. But don’t panic when this happens. Track the
project and log all the relevant stuff that did not meet your expectations. Make everyone
aware of the challenge and deploy the right resource to fix the issue. If doing so is not
enough, you can initiate change and recommend a better alternative. These issue
tracking template and change request form are just the right tools to set everything right.
25. Issue Tracking (ProjectManager.com, Excel)
26. Change Request Form (Google Docs)
KPI monitoring
Never let project performance become a guessing game. Stay on top of the situation by
having visibility and control over all the facts on the ground. After all, projects have
specific benchmarks against which team and individual performance can be measured.
These metrics allow for the accurate assessment of the project’s overall health and
whether it remains on schedule, within budget, and aligned with expectations. This KPI
monitoring template can help you track relevant metrics and keep the project running
according to plan.
Getting everyone on the same page can take some effort, especially if you’re managing
a project that involves several departments. These templates clarify the structure,
accountabilities, and interdependence of all teams in the project. They can also serve
as ad-hoc directories to quickly identify and connect with stakeholders.
These templates will help you keep everyone updated and always on the same page.
Use dashboards to provide a bird’s eye view of a project’s status and performance.
Create informative and actionable meeting notes to establish clarity and move teams
forward. And always cap a completed project with a post-mortem “lessons learned”
session.
Conclusion
If you hate challenges, you’ll never love project management. To succeed in the
field, you need to handle a lot of moving parts — from timelines and budget to
quality control and issue handling. Managing a project takes skill and discipline,
but fortunately, you don’t always have to reinvent the wheel.
These templates include some of the most commonly used documents in project
management. You can download the documents to your device or make copies in
your cloud storage. These can always be repurposed by every team in your
organization. Remember, you can customize or fine-tune any of the documents
listed here to fit your specific project or operational environment.
To get started on project management, you can check our Project Management
Basics course. If you need advanced training, we have a library of bite-sized
lessons to keep your skills sharp.