Project Management Template

Using a project management timeline template to illustrate a project’s critical activities, deadlines and progress helps project planners to kickstart their initiatives and improve the way they coordinate the involved teams and required efforts.

Being a project manager means crafting numerous important documents for planning, scheduling, reviewing and communicating tasks, specifications, deliverables and much more.
Creating all this documentation from scratch is time-consuming, which makes project timeline templates an essential resource for making the best of one’s time.

To help you organize your work better, we’ve compiled here a series of must-know facts about project management timelines, accompanied by a professionally-designed template that can be easily customized into a well-integrated project plan.

How do you write a project management timeline?

Managing a project becomes easier when you rely on a timeline instead of a spreadsheet or basic to-do list. A project management timeline helps you clearly view how all the pieces fit together so here is the step-by-step process of creating an effective one:

1. Create a project brief – serving as a guide that explains the purpose, goals, milestones and vision of the overall project, it keeps all project stakeholders aligned.
2. Determine your to-do list – identify all the actions and events that need to happen in order for your project to come through.
3. Estimate the duration of each of your identified steps – by figuring out how much it will take to finish a task against the project’s overall timeframe, you will be able to properly schedule and sequence them into a clear roadmap.
4. Map out dependencies – state if any tasks can be carried out simultaneously and define how these overlapping items depend on one another. Doing so will help you better track progress and stay on course.
5. Create the timeline of your project to visualize the course of action and all the essential milestones that need to be achieved.
   You can make a timeline either with the help of various office tools such as Excel, or by using a timeline template like the one available for download here.

How do I create a project management timeline in Excel?

To create an Excel project management timeline, follow the steps below:

1. Click on the Insert tab of the Microsoft Excel’s ribbon.
2. Go to Insert a SmartArt Graphic and select the Process option.
3. Find the Basic Timeline chart type and click on it.
4. Edit the text within the text pane to illustrate your project data.

What is a project timeline template?

A project timeline template is a pre-built bar chart to which you can add your own project data to create a customized visual. Saving you the time and effort of starting from scratch, a project timeline template improves efficiency and also brings standardization to your project management process.

Using and updating the Project Management Template 

Project managers need a plan overview that they can share with team, partners and stakeholders. The project management template was created to help managers plan and communicate their projects broadly. It will illustrate the critical tasks and milestones, and how much the project has progressed.

Project management templates help project managers to communicate with clear visuals that are not complicated or difficult. They are designed so important audiences can quickly understand the major deliverables of the project and see the progress of the plan at a glance. This project management timeline template is a PowerPoint download that can easily be edited and used for newsletters, documents, proposals, project reviews or scorecards. Project management teams that use PowerPoint can collaborate on the template and quickly share their slides with customers, partners and management.

The timeline template can be changed in PowerPoint or you can use Office Timeline’s free project management tool to instantly update it and automatically adjust it as your project schedules change. The project management timeline tool was created as a PowerPoint plug-in so project managers can easily make timelines and Gantt charts right from inside the familiar application.

The tool is useful for updating the slide quickly without having to rebuild it. If dates for milestones and tasks slip or when they have been completed, you can immediately update the project management template. You can also show progress with the percent complete or Today’s Date feature. Office Timeline Pro+ Edition is integrated with project management applications such as Microsoft Project or Excel, so any project data you have previously created can automatically be transformed into a project management slide like this template.

With the Office Timeline project management tool for Microsoft PowerPoint, project excellence has never been easier. The app will help you update and revise this project management template automatically, or you can use it to make new project management slides as quickly as your managers and customers need them.