Using Cloud Coach Project Templates

Do you find yourself building the same projects over and over? Whether you’re a professional services company with standard packages, a software company with customer onboarding and deployment projects, or an internal team lead leading complex projects, the process of building projects in your project management system can take a significant amount of time.

There’s an easy way to manage your projects in Cloud Coach without starting from scratch each time: Project Templates.

Project templates allow you to build a project, with its associated phases, tasks and dependencies, and then use that project as a template to speed up future project launches. This can be one of the most important tools in your arsenal as a project manager.

Why should you use project templates?

• Save time. As a busy project manager, you have more to do in your day than build out repetitive projects in your project management system. When you use project templates, you can build out the project type once, and then clone it for all future projects.

• Ensure best practices are followed. When you create a project from a template in Cloud Coach, you clone all of your project details, phases, tasks, durations and dependencies. You don’t have to worry about forgetting a step when building a project, and when you identify a new method that works better, you can incorporate those learnings into your template for future implementation.

• Improve cross-project collaboration. If multiple members of your team work on the same types of projects, templates are an effective way to integrate best practices learned across multiple projects.

When should you use a project template?

There are two key considerations when deciding to use a project template:

• Frequency. Even small, relatively simple projects that are done with a high frequency can benefit from templates. A project, no matter how complex, that will only be done once in an organization may not need to be templatized.  

• Complexity. Highly complex projects with many details and dependencies will also benefit from templates. Even if you’re doing the project only once or twice a year, templates can help you ensure that you’re capturing the details of your project.

Here are some common instances where project templates may be useful:

• New Customer Onboarding
• Marketing Campaigns
• Product Development
• IT Roll-outs

How to create a project template in Cloud Coach

Creating a project template in Cloud Coach is as easy as creating a project. Simply build your project as you ordinarily would, but click the “Project Template” box in the System Information section of your project details page.