MS Project Best Practices – Maintain Project Plan Templates

No two projects are same. But you will still find some items repeating in each and every project. So also is the fact that each project will come across areas of improvement.

How do you ensure that we don’t miss out those common tasks in our next project?

The common tasks  could be part of the process followed at the organizational level or by the nature of the project. A project manager who have executed project in the organization in the past, will be aware of those. But how about a project manager who joined your organization recently and about to start with his maiden project?

Having this mandatory tasks or items as stipulated by the organization or type of project captured in a project plan template helps in addressing this scenario.

How do you ensure that the mistakes made in the current project are not repeated in future projects?

Lessons learned is the formal way of addressing this. You can maintain a centralized repository with adequate indexing and search criterion , so that its easy to find what you are looking for. But this still doesn’t ensure that we will miss something in future.

Each lessons learned will end up with a recommendation on how this mistakes can be avoided. And this recommendations should be implemented either on the processes or templates or tools used for project management.

So if any of the recommendations can be addressed by including that as a task in a project plan, then a project plan template is the right place.

Project Management Office(PMO) owners change, so will Project Managers. But embedding the best practices or lessons learned in our processes , templates and tools ensures that experience gained by our predecessors are utilized by future team.

Last but not the least, have your project plan template available on a centralized repository. And make it mandatory to Project Managers to always use a  template to start off with their individual project plan.

See Also : More articles on MS Project

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