Top 5 Features in the Free SharePoint Project Management Template from BrightWork
These days, it’s all about collaborative project management. It’s about working better and more efficiently with your team to move projects forward, and the free SharePoint Project Management Template is perfect to achieve this.
But managing a project isn’t easy. That’s why we have completely overhauled the free Project Management Template for SharePoint to help you keep your projects on track. This template is pre-planned for project management, is designed with visual and intuitive project reports, and brings all your project information together in one central project site.
Let’s take a look at five of the key features in the latest version of the free SharePoint Project Management Template.
1. Getting Started Links
At the very top of the project homepage, you will see a new set of blue ‘Getting Started’ tiles. These tiles (Promoted Links as they are called in the SharePoint lexicon) give project managers a clear set of activities to set up the project site.
To date, we have found that many people are not full-time project managers, so the idea with Getting Started is to give people a simple, yet structured approach to help them get up and running with the project.
The tiles follow a logical sequence you’d expect when initiating a project:
- Setup Project — which is essentially the Project Charter or Statement
- Add Tasks — brings you directly into the Tasks Lists, where you can add tasks and plan the project
- Add Documents — links to the document library in your SharePoint site, a great place to store and collaborate on any project documents or deliverables
- Training Tutorial — links back to the BrightWork website with a free training video that explains the best practices for using the free template.
2. Key Project Metrics
Just below the Promoted Links, you’ll find a set of clickable metric tiles. These dashboards let you know how you are doing against the project schedule.
The tiles will help you track how many Late Tasks there are on the project, and to keep an eye on the current project finish date to ensure you adhere to the project timelines.
The final box shows you the last time the project site was been updated, so you know that people are actually updating their work!
3. Project Status Icons
The third new feature is the introduction of Red-Yellow-Green status indicators on the project site homepage.
These icons give you a really good sense of where your project is at in terms of Time, Health, or Cost. We’ve also added percent complete as well.
4. Tasks by Status Chart
Not everyone likes to read from lists nor do they derive value from it.
Within the free template, you can now view a summary of project tasks in the status chart. This is a visual summary of tasks to make it easy for everyone to stay up-to-date.
5. Project Management Guidance
One of the most important features to highlight is the project management guidance that has been added to the Project Wiki.
As I mentioned above, we have found that most people managing projects are “Project Managers by Accident” (PMBAs). So we wanted to give them some insight into a basic approach to project management.
The guidance covers the typical stages of a project, from Initiation through to Close. You can use it as is, make edits as necessary, or remove it if you want to. The guidance is based on the framework in our Collaborative Project Management Handbook.
One additional enhancement to round this out — the Tasks List in the template is mapped to the project phases explained in the Wiki. This is pre-populated when you get the template, based on the collaborative approach, giving you a head start on project planning.
Summary
The free SharePoint Project Management Template is currently being used by over 40,000 organizations worldwide to successfully manage projects with SharePoint. And this newest release has made it even easier.
Download this free template, you will:
- Easily plan your project with a pre-planned project management template
- Get instant visibility into the status your project with KPIs and visual reporting dashboards
- Collaborate more effectively with your team in a centralized project site in SharePoint
Originally published at www.brightwork.com.
