Project templates

Introduction

Here you see a list of your existing project templates. From this administration page you can select to edit, activate, deactivate or delete your templates.

Description

The page is divided into two sections.

Filter

In the Filter you can show to see the following:

• Show active project templates
• Show inactive project templates
• Show all project templates

Show active project templates is the default view of the page.

Project template

In this section you see your project templates based on the selected filter.

Name

The names of the project templates are links. If you click a name, you can edit the name and description of the project template.

Description

You can write a description of each project template, which the other users can see, when they select to create a project based on a project template. This makes it possible for you to write an explanation for your colleagues, so they use the project templates for the right projects.

Active

Here you can see whether a project template is active or inactive.

A green checkmark shows that it is active, and a grey circle shows that it is inactive. You can activate or deactivate a template by clicking the circle, and thereby easily change the status of your project template. If it is deactivated, it will no longer show in the list of project templates, when an employee creates a new project.

You can select to mark several templates at once by marking the checkbox next to the Active column to activate/deactivate or delete several templates at once. It is done by selecting an action in the Select action drop down menu and clicking OK.

Actions

To the right, you have three icons allowing different actions:

Editing your project template (the project icon):

Here you can click to edit your project template, which will open the template as an ordinary project, where you can add to and edit your setup on the project. You will always see that you are editing a template.

When you have made your changes, you need to click Save. Thereafter you get the opportunity to:

• Overwrite the existing template
• Save it as a new template

Updating existing projects

If you select to overwrite the existing project template, you will get the opportunity to update your existing projects, which are based on the template, by marking Update projects created from this template.

When you click Save, you get a list of the projects based on the template, and here you can select, if you would like to update all your existing projects or single projects by marking the checkboxes.

When you have saved the project template and updated your existing projects, you will see a log of the changes that have been made to your projects under Reports -> Production reports -> Project templates – Change log. You thereby get a status of if all your projects have been updates with your changes, or if some projects could not be updated with the changes you have made in the template.

You can update your existing projects based on the following:

• New tasks
• Updates of task name, type and status
• Deleted tasks (if possible)
• New milestones
• New names on milestones
• Deleted milestones (if possible)
• New contracts
• Project plan layout (if possible)

Please note: If you have made a project plan based on several project templates, the project plan will only be updates with the changes from the first template you used.

If you make changes to your project plan’s WBS structure, you will have limited options to maintain your project plan via changes in the project template. New sub tasks will not be updated in the project plan. New main tasks you create in the template can be inserted in the project plans you have created from the project template earlier.

You can delete tasks in your projects without losing the link to your template. Your project will still be updated with changes from your template.

If you copy tasks and milestones in the project plan, it will still be linked to your template. It means that if you add new tasks and milestones in the project plan, they are placed in the project plan according to the template structure. It is done in this way, as it is necessary to use the structure in the template to make updates in the project plan.

Editing name and description of your project template (the pencil)

Here you can click to edit the name and the description of your project template, but not the setup of the project. You do that by clicking the project icon.

Deleting your project template (the bin)

If you delete a project template, the link between the projects you have created based on the template breaks, and you will no longer be able to update these projects based on changes in the template.

Special remarks

Creating new project templates

If you wish to create a new template from this page, you will need to edit an existing template and save it as a new template.

If you wish to create a new template from scratch, you will need to create a new project and save it as a new template. You do this by clicking the lightning in the top right corner and saving the project as a project template.

Hereafter, you will be able to find it in the list of your project templates for further processing.

Learn more about how you create a project. In the video below we demonstrate how you can use project templates for new projects. 

Continue working while the system updates your templates

You might have selected to update many projects, which takes a while for the system to process. You can just continue your work in TimeLog, and then you get a notification when all your updates are managed, and if there a single projects which could not be updates.