Project Management Templates

This 4-box matrix is useful for prioritizing new feature ideas for a product or software application.

To get started with this board, you'll likely want to delete all the existing cards. You can do that quickly by holding down the shift key and drawing a box around the cards with your mouse. This will select multiple cards at which time you can use the LEFT card menu on any of the highlighted cards and choose "Delete Selected Cards".

Place the feature ideas into the board according to how Urgent they are and the Impact that they will have on the overall program.

Items will fall into one of four boxes, suggesting the proper next step.

High Impact, High Urgency --> INCLUDE.  Include these items in the next release, or as soon as possible.

Low Impact, High Urgency --> REVISIT.  Revisit these items at a later date to see if the Urgency has changed.

Low Impact, Low Urgency --> EXCLUDE.  No need for something that is not urgent and has low impact.

High Impact, Low Urgency --> DEBATE.  Just because things are not urgent doesn't mean they aren't important. Stakeholders like users and executives often don't place value on things like infrastructure, or refactoring and so these items may need more serious debate to determine if they should be include in the next release or product iteration.

Cardsmith Pro-tip: Use the Zoom Slider Bar to make the Feature Prioritization background image larger or smaller in order to fit your screen. 

Use this retrospective brainstorm board with your team at the close of one sprint before the team begins the next sprint.

A retrospective typically consists of asking the team to brainstorm answers to the following four questions:

1. What went well?
2. What could have gone better?
3. What do we want to try next?  (start something new, or drop something that we don’t think is necessary)
4. What questions do we have?

Once the team brainstorms and records answers to the above questions, they can be prioritized, grouped, and discussed. Changes to the way the team works together or how they interact with management or their customer can then be decided and implemented as part of the next sprint.

The retrospective is also a time to celebrate the closing of the last sprint as a team accomplishment. It’s a great time to come together in a positive way to build trust and rapport amongst the team members.

The retrospective is an opportunity to review the team’s accuracy in meeting the last sprint’s goals. Were all User Stories completed? If not, what did we learn? Do we need to change something to get better at estimating Story Points? Can we challenge ourselves to complete more Story Points next Sprint?

This Current Sprint Scrum Board has:  

1. A freeform view that allows a space to break down user stories into tasks and sub-tasks. 
2. A grid view with a scrum board that maps tasks to user stories and tracks the work through to completion.

Once the user stories have been selected for the upcoming sprint, you can use the freeform board here to collaborate with your team in breaking down the user stories into tasks and subtasks. Once that is done, change to the grid view and place each user story into a row of the grid. You can add rows to the grid easily to make space for each user story using the row menu (hover over the row title and say add row below or above).

Next, place all the task cards related to each user story into the Backlog column. You are now ready to kick off your sprint with your team, do a daily standup and watch task cards move from left to right as they get completed.

If there are dependencies between the tasks, you can indicate that with connector lines as we have demonstrated in this examp.

Follow this link to learn more about how this board fits into an overarching agile project process see the following post. 

https://cardsmith.co/how-to-build-your-own-kanban-or-scrumban-board-in-12-steps/.

Cardsmith Pro-tip: When you change board views, cards that were added to another view will be in the “Hidden Cards” area at the bottom on your board. Once positioned on a Freeform or Grid View, cards remain on that View. So you can always go back and forth between the Scrum Board Grid and the Work breakdown view of your current sprint board.  

An example product backlog board from Scrum.

One of the first things the agile product owner, product manager or program manager must do is prioritize and scope the Sprint. Story Points can be used as a measure. We estimate that our team can deliver on six to seven story points in the two week Sprint.

This board tracks all of the user stories that we currently have yet to be completed and allows the team to prioritize and then move the user stories up to the “next sprint” row as a way to check the estimated volume of work (story points) and decide which user stories will go into the next Sprint. Once this is completed the product owner would likely copy or move these cards into a CURRENT SPRINT board for execution.

Story points are added up using the Grid Totals feature found on the board’s main menu (upper left of screen). 

Follow this link to learn more about how to design a customized product backlog and other agile boards used in Scrum:    

https://cardsmith.co/how-to-build-your-own-kanban-or-scrumban-board-in-12-steps/.

Cardsmith Pro-tip: Once you have added fields to User Story cards, use the “Set Default Card” option so the fields are added to new cards added to that board. You can then turn on Grid Totals for this Board in the Board Menu to be able to view the total Story Points.  

Here’s what creating a Program Portfolio Kanban Board can do for your team:  

1. Clarify priorities for management so they may better support your team. 
2. Improve project delivery speed and quality.
3. Alignment of the team around the high priority projects so more gets done faster.
4. Improve team accountability and trust. 
5. Improve team morale by reducing stress and uncertainty. 

Kanban is a visual tool from Lean. It is used by teams to improve the flow of work and keep the team focused on a limited number of tasks, features, or projects at a time.  

This is a Kanban board designed to visualize and track all of the projects when you have a lot of projects such as in a program, a department, or an entire organization. You can customize the columns which are steps in the process from Idea to delivery to be whatever process steps you and your team need. Simply add, delete or rename columns.  

Follow this link to learn more about how to design a customized kanban board that will best support your team:  

https://cardsmith.co/how-to-build-your-own-kanban-or-scrumban-board-in-12-steps/.

If you need to sell the idea of using Kanban to your management or team, this video on finding your WHY for implementing Kanban in this youtube video:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHBPua6qLG4

Writing, publishing and promoting a blog post consists of several steps. If more than one person is involved, keeping track of where everything is at can be challenging.  

This Kanban-style board addresses this challenge.  

Each Card is a blog post or an idea for a blog post.  Cards start on the left in the ‘Ideas’ column and then flow to the right into the ‘Done’ Column.   The rows are a couple of audiences that blogs will be written for– your different audience personas. 

We’ve left a note card in ORANGE in every column so you can learn how Cardsmith tracks our blogs. Feel free to adapt this board to your process by adding, deleting columns or changing the titles of columns. If a team member named Mike is responsible for creating images for Post – Add “Mike” to the Images column title for added clarity.

Pro Tips: 

1. Make sure to set the default card if you add or remove fields from the blog post card.
2. A key factor in what makes Kanban work is to limit work in process, which in turn limits multi-tasking, keeps the team focused and helps get more blog posts done faster and in a nice predictable flow. Because consistency is key with blogging, you can use the visual kanban to show you what steps may be impeding the flow of work and which steps are starved for work.
3. When someone moves a card to the next step (column) they can leave a board comment for the person responsible for the next step. That person will then see an alert on their board the next time they login to Cardsmith. This makes handoffs seamless and lets the work FLOW!
4. You can hold down the shift key and click to select several cards (such as the orange header cards).  Once you have multiple cards selected, use the left side card menu to delete them all in one step.  

If you really want to go deep on Kanban and how it can be setup to make your blog posts flow quickly and consistently through the process check out this post: https://cardsmith.co/how-to-build-your-own-kanban-or-scrumban-board-in-12-steps/

This board is a concept map created during the sample project’s initiation phase.

Creating a map like this can help clarify the purpose of a project, linking it to key strategic initiatives.  It can be used to help understand the company’s goals and strategies, and how these things may be supported by the proposed solution.

Having a map like this later on can also be useful in controlling scope creep. Does the added scope support the high level project objectives?  Have the objectives changed?  Having a visual tool like this can help facilitate conversations with executives and other stakeholders throughout the life of a project.

Here’s what creating a Kanban Board can do for your team:  

1. Clarify priorities for management so they may better support your team. 
2. Improve project delivery speed and quality.
3. Alignment of the team around the high priority work so more gets done faster.
4. Improve team accountability and trust. 
5. Improve team morale by reducing stress and uncertainty. 

Kanban is a visual tool from Lean. It is used by teams to improve the flow of work and keep the team focused on a limited number of tasks, features, or projects at a time.  

Ideally, each card in a Kanban board would be a valuable chunk of work. In other words it would be a stand alone item that when it is done, it is ready to be consumed by the end user.  However, with more complex projects where you may have multiple teams working on a project, there can be dependencies between chunks of work. The value is not realized until all of the work is completed.  Therefore, it is important to visualize how the work being done by one team is dependent on or is a blocker to another piece of work. You can easily achieve this in Cardsmith by using “Connectors”.  

This video demonstrates in 1 minute how to use connectors:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcklZ_9rdJQ

Pro Tips: 

1. If you add fields to a card and want to always have those fields on new cards select Set Default Card from the card menu (see the lower right menu on this card) 
2. If you find that your Kanban board has too many connectors and they are difficult to read, you  can click on any card menu and select “Highlight my Connectors”.  This will hide other connectors.  You can continue to Highlight connectors one card at a time should you wish to follow a chain of dependencies upstream.  
3. If you want to track story points, estimated time, an effort swag, etc. you can add a field to your cards (use the Default Card), and then turn on Grid Totals to track this at the Column, Row, and/or Cell level.  

Follow this link to learn more about how to design a customized Kanban board that will best support your team:  

https://cardsmith.co/how-to-build-your-own-kanban-or-scrumban-board-in-12-steps/.

If you need to sell the idea of using Kanban to your management or team, this video on finding your WHY for implementing Kanban in this youtube video:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHBPua6qLG4

Here’s what creating a Kanban Board can do for your team:  

1. Clarify priorities for management so they may better support your team. 
2. Improve project delivery speed and quality.
3. Alignment of the team around the high priority work so more gets done faster.
4. Improve team accountability and trust. 
5. Improve team morale by reducing stress and uncertainty. 

Kanban is a visual tool from Lean. It is used by teams to improve the flow of work and keep the team focused on a limited number of tasks, features, or projects at a time.  

This is a basic Kanban board. You can customize the columns which are steps in the process from Idea to delivery to be whatever process steps you and your team need. Simply add, delete or rename columns.  

We’ve also set up this board with Grid Totals (from the Board’s main menu) to make sure our Work In Process does not get too large.    

Pro Tip:  if you add fields to a card and want to always have those fields on new cards select Set Default Card from the card menu (see the lower right menu on this card) 

Follow this link to learn more about how to design a customized kanban board that will best support your team.   

https://cardsmith.co/how-to-build-your-own-kanban-or-scrumban-board-in-12-steps/.

If you need to sell the idea of using Kanban to your management or team, this video on finding your WHY for implementing Kanban in this youtube video:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHBPua6qLG4

Breakdown project objectives into features, major deliverables, and tasks.

After your project’s objectives are defined, define the end deliverable(s) and break down the work into smaller chunks. This example board gets the process started.

Pro tip:  Make sure you keep your projects overall objectives handy either in the board or with a link to your Project Objectives board.

Using a board like this to visualize projects in flight, completed and planned can:

1. help ensure capacity is not overloaded.
2. assist management in making difficult choices about project priorities.
3. keep a management team appraised of progress of a large portfolio of projects.

This template was inspired by an IT director who uses Cardsmith to track and communicate all the of IT projects for a year, organized by department.
Each of the cards on this board represents a project.

If a project has a more detailed board in Cardsmith – or in another project management system, you can put a link to it inside the project card – simply copy/paste the link to the Board into a text field.

Here’s what creating a Sprint Planning Board can do for your team:  

1. Visualize a wide variety of user stories across multiple sprints and potentially multiple teams (as in with Scaled Agile). 
2. Maximize current team capabilities and capacity in order to deliver more valuable work to customers.

Cardsmith provides an ideal way to map out user stories across sprints because you can visualize dependencies between stories and easily arrange stories in a sequence that meets customer needs and fits the constraints of the team. To help manage capacity and plan appropriately sized sprints, a story point or swag field can be added up by row, column and cell using the Grid Totals function. Connectors are added using the “Link to” item on the card menu while in board view (card is not open).

The Sprint Planning process uses story points in order to size features or chunks of work into relative sizing. Overtime the team, and via sprint retrospectives, the team will learn how many story points they can reliably finish in a single sprint.

Pro Tip:  if you add fields to a card and want to always have those fields on new cards select Set Default Card from the card menu (see the lower right menu on this card) 

Here’s what creating a “Scrumban” board can do for your team:  

1. Clarify priorities for management so they may better support your team. 
2. Improve project delivery speed and quality.
3. Alignment of the team around the current sprint tasks and user stories in order to deliver the sprint on-time.
4. Improve team accountability and trust. 
5. Improve team morale by reducing stress and uncertainty. 

Scrumban is a hybrid between Kanban and Scrum. It is used by teams to improve the flow of work and keep the team focused on a limited number of user stories (increments of customer valuable work). The main difference between this board and a pure Kanban board is that this board will hold only the work from the current Sprint, and tasks are arranged by user stories. Future user stories will be held in the product backlog board. We provide another template board for this. 

You can customize the columns which are steps in the process from Idea to delivery to be whatever process steps you and your team need. Simply add, delete or rename columns. 

Follow this link to learn more about how to design a customized scrumban board that will best support your team and to learn about the other boards that can be used to support a good agile process, see this post:   

https://cardsmith.co/how-to-build-your-own-kanban-or-scrumban-board-in-12-steps/.

If you need to sell the idea of using Kanban to your management or team, this video on finding your WHY for implementing Kanban in this youtube video:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHBPua6qLG4

Here’s what creating a Project Objectives Board can do for your team:   

1. Clarify project priorities such as on-time, on-budget, within scope.
2. Keep the team and management focused on what is important about this project.
3. Prevent scope creep.
4. Measure the success of a project once it is delivered.

This board demonstrates how to use the Freeform View to map project objectives to strategic objectives.

The Grid View prioritizes project objectives and project priorities (e.g. budget, scope, quality, time, budget — not everything can be equally important!) 

Quick tip: did you know you can have the same cards under two different views? Switch from Freeform to Grid view and then drag some or all of the cards from Hidden Cards into the Grid cells. Switch back to the Freeform view and notice all your cards are still there.  

Planning an event to raise funds for a charity, political campaign or just to make some cash?

Use this board to help you research and track ideas for venues, sponsors, decor, PR and more… simply add additional rows or columns to track additional items.

Calendar view board in vertical format. Use this template to track your year.

Calendar view board in horizontal format. Use this template to track your year.

A month calendar layout board in a weekly format. Use this template to track your month.

Use this team roles and bio board so that you and your team can:

1. quickly see who else is on the team and what their role is.
2. If you need a Bio for someone who is speaking, or authoring an article, you can quickly find it.

Keeping this board up to date takes only seconds every time you add a new team member, and it pays off because everyone will have this information at their fingertips.

Did you know you can link Cardsmith Boards together in a Master Dashboard?  

Every board, and every card for that matter, has a unique URL that can be used to link to and open another board.  

This board is an example of how one might use the text or link fields in Cardsmith to link a lot of different boards together. 

For example, if you have a project where there is a stakeholder register, a project milestone board, a project to company strategy board, and a kanban board, you can bring those all together for the convenience of your team and stakeholders.  

The default card in this Cardsmith board have common stakeholder interview questions.  You can customize the cards for your interviews, and use this board for tracking scheduling and completing a series of stakeholder interviews for your project.

Quick Tip:  If you change the interview questions, make sure to set the default card after you’ve added fields and removed fields to one of the sample cards before creating more interviewee cards.

Here’s what using a stakeholder register can do for your project:  

1. Provide a central location to gather and maintain details about project stakeholders. 
2. Proactively manage stakeholder communications. Not all stakeholders will need or want the same type, frequency or format of communications.
3. Help prioritize stakeholders.
4. Decrease the risk of your project failing for political reasons.

This board is handy for tracking internal project stakeholders. Categorizing people by their level of interest (or support) and their influence within the organization can help you proactively manage stakeholder communications and minimize political risk to your project’s success.

Quick Tip:  We’ve setup a default card with the fields commonly tracked during the Stakeholder Analysis process of Project Management. You can add your own fields, and then select “Set as Default Card” on the Card menu.

Communicate your project status in this dashboard.

If you need to communicate project status to an executive team or other stakeholders, you may want to create a very summarized view so they don’t have to wade through a lot of details.  You can use Icons and Green, Yellow and Red colors to indicate visually the status of your project.

Quick Tip:  You can link these cards to other more detailed project boards for those who want to know the nitty gritty details, can ‘drill down’ to those more detailed task boards.

Gather Requirements for change management.