INFORMATION: Project Templates

PRINCE 2 and PMP qualified professionals developed the SKM Project Management Steps Templates over several years.

We spend thousands of hours researching, developing and using the templates to ensure its continued relevance and benefits across the following industries and sectors:

Advertising, Media & Entertainment
Call Centre & Customer Services
Construction & Civil Engineering
Defence, Military & Armed Forces
Education
Engineering
Finance, Accounting & Banking
Food & Hospitality
Healthcare & Medical
HR & Recruitment
IT & Telecommunications
Legal
Manufacturing
Mining, Energy, Oil & Gas
Office & Administration
Retail & Consumer Products
Sales & Marketing
Science, Biotech & Pharmaceuticals
Trades & Services
Transport & Logistics
Travel & Tourism

Over 30 ‘ready to use’ project document templates, which covers all stages in a typical Project Delivery Lifecycle

The templates are used successfully by:

Managers,
Teams,
Consultants and
Trainers

to start-up, initiate, define, plan, execute, close and deliver both IT and business projects.

Additionally, Business owners use the program to help stage Marketing Events, Conferences, Seminars, Product launches or Office moves.

Also, Lecturers and Educationists use the program to teach the principles of project management to their students. They also include the project document templates into their discussions to with students to role-play real-life situations and scenarios.

The image below shows the list of the 30 ‘Ready to Use’ Project Templates:

project management steps

Click here for an alphabetic listing of the templates and a product description of each one.

During our research, we found that many templates, including the ‘FREE Download’ variety, were VERY basic, and did not offer a large amount of background information and guidance for how to use it. In other words, they did not provide TRAINING. The templates we produce and offer do not fit into that category. The differences between the SKM Project Document templates and those from some of our competitors are:

There is a consistent look and feel to the SKM template.

There is typically a lot of ‘training’ embedded in the SKM template, they are substantive

The SKM templates are in an easily adapted format. All the SKM templates are created in Microsoft Office format and used to deliver projects in any project focused environment, including PRINCE 2 and PM-BOK

The SKM templates are not expensive

The SKM templates are regularly assessed and updated to reflect current project management ‘best practice’
These templates will give you a great boost and confidence when used in your work environment. They help will you to manage your projects better and improve your project success.

Please find attached, links to PDF samples of the SKM Business Case and Project Status Report document templates. Click here

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Your boss has asked you to take the lead on a project in your company. Maybe you are a project manager, or maybe you are not. One thing is certain. Very few people know how to report status on a project, even when they are expert project managers. The basic problem?

Most people do not understand the perspective of a manager who is being pressed for information about a big project. Here are some basic rules of reporting status that you can use to further your reputation as someone who knows how to keep management and the project team informed and drive a project to success through the project phases.

THE MANAGEMENT PERSPECTIVE

If your project is important, your boss will be pressed hard to keep his superiors informed of its progress. Smart managers consume status on important projects voraciously. Excellent status reporting means that managers are fully informed of your projects health and overall direction without having to get involved themselves.

There is particular information your boss needs in order to show her boss that she is on top of things and able to run the show effectively. Provide this information in a way your boss can consume it on a regular basis, and you will fall upstairs so fast your head will spin.

Even on relatively less important projects, effective status reporting allows your boss to spend only a few seconds skimming your report to determine what sort of progress you have made.

Excellent status creates clarity from confusion and fulfills one of the important requirements in the project management steps process. Your job as the manager of a project is to take a swirling, chaotic cloud of information and distill it down into its most basic elements and then present them so that hundreds and thousands of hours of work can be understood in 30 seconds.

TO WRITE EXCELLENT STATUS ON PROGRESS WITHIN THE PROJECT MANAGEMENT STEPS LIFE-CYCLE, YOU MUST UNDERSTAND :

The three components of status.
How to write brief details.
What key data is needed by management.

THREE COMPONENTS OF STATUS IN THE PROJECT MANAGEMENT STEPS PROCESS

There are three major components to reporting project status:

Overall: We need to see the overall project health. As managers, we want to be able to detect a project in trouble. We also want to help make that determination sometimes. You might not know everything we know despite our best efforts to communicate. Your project might not be as healthy as you think it is.

Milestones: Your project has major accomplishments which must be completed by specific dates. We managers want to see which milestones are complete, which ones are in progress, and which ones are coming up next. This allows us to analyse the schedule and decide to either feel comfortable with it or challenge it.

Issues: Your project also probably has one or more obstacles to completion which have been discovered. We’d like to see brief details about each issue so that we can make a decision about whether or not to step in and help if necessary.

ORGANISING YOUR STATUS THROUGHOUT THE PROJECT MANAGEMENT STEPS PROCESS

Just as you would clean a kitchen by starting up high and working your way down ultimately to the floor, project status is best when it starts off with the highest levels of detail and works it way down to lower and lower levels.

Thus:

Overall project health comes first. If I like what I see here, I can stop reading the rest. Major milestones follow overall project health. If I don’t like the project health, or if I am in need of further details, I can read a little further and check out the scheduled dates we are driving toward and your progress on them. Issues may be holding up those dates, so when I see a problem in your project schedule, I can read further and see what it is. Really slick project managers report the issues in priority order showing the issue causing the most jeopardy to progress first.

BRIEF DETAILS

Your job is to report on the details of your project in concise, crisp status that we can consume rapidly without having to spend much effort on it. It might take you thirty minutes to write your status, but always remember that your manager does not have thirty minutes to spend reading it. Your manager realistically only has about 30 seconds to consume your status as they may have 30, 40, 100, or even exponentially more projects for which they are responsible.

“Brief Details” may seem oxymoronic to a project manager, but to a supervisor with a team of project managers, it is not. There is enormous value in a project manager who can report status without narrative. My recommendation is that you write as though you were creating an old-fashioned telegram. More information about how to do that is coming.

BRIEF DETAILS?

How can you provide details without being long-winded? It is a formidable task that most never master, but it is not impossible. Here are some suggestions, e.g. Write in bullets, not in prose. There shall be no paragraph anywhere in your status.

Click here for your FREE Project Status Report template, by SKM Project Management Steps.

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