How to work with project templates

Using project templates will save your team a lot of time. No more repetitive work and you also streamline the way your organization works, making sure the structure of your projects is coherent.

Let us have a look at how you can set up project templates in OpenProject.

Create and remove project templates

In OpenProject, only administrators can create and remove project templates. That way, there is a handful of people ensuring consistency and overseeing the amount and structure of templates.

To set up a new project template, you do the same as creating a new project.

You name your project that will become your template.

To make this project a template, go to project settings.

And click set as template to make the project a template.

In case a project template is not relevant anymore and should not be used any longer, this is also the spot where you can remove it from templates.

Project templates example case

We will demonstrate which modules you can set up to make best use of project templates.

Let us use the example of organizing a conference. This is something that can occur frequently, e.g. quarterly or annually. In order to not having to start from scratch every time and also to help in case different colleagues are organizing conferences, a template can be very useful to save time and build on past experiences.

Naming your template

When you create your project template as described above, consider adding template to its name, making it easy to distinguish it from your normal projects. Your project template will appear e.g. in the project list so that you would want to be able to see which of the projects serve as templates.

Modules template

Activate the relevant modules for your template und project settings. This way these modules will always appear and can be used straight away.

Work package template

Set up the work packages needed to manage your project from initiation to closing. Thereby include relations and hierarchies to make it quick and easy when you start a new project from your template.

Of course you can also customize your work package form in the template to include all relevant information for your organization. Every time you open a new work package, you will then see the attribute list that you had set up.

Agile boards template

If you are using the boards view to get things done with your team, set these up, too. Configuring the lists of action boards will provide you with prefilled boards as they automatically draw input from your work packages.

Members template

Consider setting up your members for your project templates. Either the whole team will always be the same or you set up the core members that will for sure be part of a project like this. Define roles and permissions, rates and groups.

Custom fields template

Creating custom fields in your project template allows you to have it available for all future projects based on this template. We created for example an approval field so that managers can approve artworks or merchandise or the likes.

Please note

We showed only the most relevant modules to give you an idea about the benefits of project templates. Meetings or Wiki and others can of course also be set up for your template.

Please note that due to complexity reasons, the modules Budgets and Time and costs cannot be copied for now. Please do not set these up in your template as when you use the template, these modules will appear empty in your newly created project.