Regardless of the years of experience, managing a new multi-team venture is often thrilling and intimidating. You’ll need to deal with constantly incoming project information, schedules of co-workers, and strict deadlines. If you have a rough plan in mind, the next step should be to create a systematic planning process and a simple project-management template. Such a framework ensures smooth project flow and makes managing a range of tasks much easier.

Plans and templates
Documenting a plan is usually the first and the most crucial step in project management. Such a move helps outline your team’s objectives and answer critical questions such as “What’s the project’s goal?” “Which tasks need to be completed first?” “How will I allocate tasks to members?” and “What are their turnaround times?”

While preparing a project plan, keep it simple and free of clutter to better understand the necessary processes and steps involved. Subsequently, you’ll be able to anticipate potential obstacles and save time. To further simplify this process, use a readily available simple project plan template. Having such a blueprint helps standardize the project management process, facilitate better communication among team members, and improve overall efficiency. The aspects and scope of your project will determine the template that needs to be employed. Here are the common forms of project plan templates you can consider:

Work schedule template
You can use Microsoft Excel to create a work schedule template to divide a project into phases, which gives a better focus on specific milestones. Such a document is also useful for managing daily and weekly tasks. You can download blank monthly work schedule templates for any month of the year. Check out the Blank monthly calendar—a work schedule calendar readily available on Microsoft’s website.

Timeline template
Instead of managing individual tasks, you can employ a timeline template to set deadlines for major activities. Managers often use timeline-focused templates in large projects that involve a high number of processes and steps.

Gantt chart
A Gantt chart is the most widely used project-management template. This horizontal bar chart depicts the start and end dates of all the tasks in a project. For almost any project, you can communicate a project’s schedule across the entire team without any hassle.

If you don’t have the time to create a template from scratch, consider using one or more of these project planning templates available on Microsoft’s official website:

Project planning timeline
You can use a Project planning timeline to track your business’ gross income and expenses over 12 months. The best thing about this MS Word template is that it’s available for free.

Milestone and task project timeline
Look no further if you need an easy-to-understand MS Excel template that gives a clear project’s work schedule roadmap. But you need a Microsoft 365 subscription to access this template.

Simple Gantt Chart
This MS Excel template helps you create a project schedule and visualize it as a Gantt chart for better understanding. You can break your project down into phases and tasks, assign tasks to your team members, and set the timelines of various tasks. Get this spreadsheet from Microsoft’s official website for free!

Gantt project planner
With a Gantt project planner, you can enter the start dates, duration, and status of each task and get a visual representation of your project’s schedule on a timeline. This template is suitable for both small and large projects and can be shared with team members to keep task owners accountable.

Steps to create a simple project plan
Follow these steps to devise a simple plan to better manage and execute your project:

Outline project scope
Before you begin working on any project, it’s crucial to define what the purpose and scope are. Project scopes can include objectives and goals, high-priority tasks, potential risks, and countermeasures to mitigate the risks. Establishing a clear project scope helps prevent scope creep, which refers to continuous or uncontrolled changes in the scope.

Set team goals
After you’ve defined clear, specific, and time-bound goals, your next task is to prioritize these goals. Then, explain to individual teams what their goals are and what they should focus on first. A significant number of projects fail due to a lack of clear goals, so ensuring all teams involved in your project clearly understand their goals is one of the most important tasks you have as a project manager or leader.

Assign tasks and responsibilities
Taking this step for everyone involved in the project may take a lot of time and effort. But it’s crucial that members know what they’re accountable for at every phase of the project. While assigning tasks, you might want to consider what kind of responsibilities each member of the team can manage and how much work you can allocate.

Make a timeline
A timeline acts as a guide for the whole project’s schedule, as it tells you which task needs to begin and the point at which it’s expected to reach completion. The estimated time a team or member is supposed to take to finish the task is also highlighted. A well-mapped timeline can become the most valuable feature of your project.

Decide important milestones
Setting milestones will allow you to divide a project into manageable phases. Taking this step will help improve the project success rate, adjust schedules by reviewing progress, communicate the progress to clients, and boost team morale with phased delivery success. Set your milestones in coordination with your timeline, assigned responsibilities, and goals.