30 project plan templates to kickstart your best work

We all love it when a project runs smoothly. When there’s a clear plan, everyone knows what needs to get done, and they follow deadlines, projects tend to get completed on time and within budget. But all that doesn’t just happen—it takes a lot of careful planning. 

Project planning takes time and tends to require a lot of manual, repetitive work—like defining project goals, creating timelines, drafting tasks, and distributing information to stakeholders and collaborators. Project plan templates can help reduce work at the beginning of the project, so you and your team members can hit the ground running. Plus, a good project template doesn’t just make starting one project easier—it sets you up for success for similar projects in the future.

What is a project plan template?

A project plan template is a duplicable resource that outlines all the steps in a project plan. Typically, a project plan template includes essential project information, such as the project timeline, task due dates, the goal of the entire project, and project milestones, among other things. Essentially, a project template allows you to “plug and play” and get a head start on your work.

Since project plan templates are reusable, they give you the building blocks you need to get started planning your project—so you don’t have to start every one from scratch. Depending on what type of project you’re planning, your project plan template could include high-level sections, upcoming tasks, color-coded custom tags, and more.

How to create a project plan template

A project plan template is a blueprint of the key components your team needs to know in order to successfully achieve your project objectives. A good project plan outlines your project deliverables, project scope, and project schedule. In particular, a good plan should track seven key project elements:

• Goals

• Success metrics

• Key stakeholders and team roles

• Budget

• Milestones and deliverables

• Timeline and schedule

• Communication plan

Not every project plan template will have all of these elements baked in. However, a good template will set you up with example tasks to help you and your team answer project needs, plan project deliverables, and get started in record time.

30 free project plan templates to standardize your project processes

Project plan templates aren’t one-size-fits-all. While a simple project plan template should cover essential project information—like timelines and milestones—the template format will vary depending on the type of project you’re planning. For example, the plan for a product launch will be pretty different from an IT project plan. 

That’s where different project plan templates come in. Whether you’re launching a small, straightforward initiative or planning a complex project, Asana’s project plan templates can help. Here are 30 free project plan templates to help you get your next project up and running in no time.

General project planning templates

1. Simple project chart template: Get started

A project chart (or Gantt chart template) visually represents your project plan on a bar graph, showing the project timeline, due dates, task dependencies, and milestones.

A simple project chart template helps break down projects into smaller, actionable steps, organizing tasks, and clarifying team responsibilities. With real-time progress tracking, it ensures smooth planning and execution without missing important steps.

2. Cross-functional project plan template: Collaborate across teams 

More often than not, projects require cross-team collaboration to be successful. When that’s the case, you need a way to easily communicate with each project team member, no matter what department they’re in. 

Our cross-functional project plan template can help. With this template, you can manage your entire project in one place—from assigning to-dos and tracking project status to communicating with other teams. Plus, Asana integrates with your other business apps, so you can attach important documents and collaborate right in the template. Say goodbye to long email threads and hard-to-find project information for good.

3. Capacity planning template: Manage team bandwidth 

Understanding the needed—and available—resources required for a project is a necessary step for every project team. But resource allocation can be tricky, and under-scoping a project can result in project creep. 

Creating a digital capacity planning template can help. Your template provides a place for you to calculate your project needs and determine the current capacity of your team—so you can compare the two and decide if you have enough resources. Custom, color-coded tags make it easy for you to quickly identify who is over- and under-capacity, so you can allocate resources accordingly.

4. Risk management plan template: Identify project risks

Identifying and evaluating what could go wrong is a critical part of project risk management, yet it’s often overlooked during fast-paced project kick-off phases. A reusable risk management plan template ensures your team can quickly identify, assess, and address risks.

Create the template at the start of a project to evaluate any potential risks' likelihood and impact. Use it to monitor ongoing risks, log new ones, and assign owners to ensure accountability for mitigation throughout the project. 

5. Agency collaboration template: Streamline external collaboration

Some projects require partnering with a marketing or creative agency, whether for an ad campaign, brand refresh, or research initiative. Successful collaboration starts with a clear plan, but relying on emails or calls can make alignment challenging.

Our agency collaboration template simplifies managing projects with external partners. Use it to draft creative briefs, track start dates, monitor progress, and manage deliverables—ensuring a seamless, productive partnership.

6. Waterfall project management template: Update your project process

The waterfall project management method is ideal for projects requiring sequential structure and clarity, where each phase must be completed before the next begins. A waterfall project management template provides a clear, step-by-step roadmap, ensuring every stage—from conception to completion—is meticulously planned. For instance, it can outline all phases of a software development project, from requirements gathering to final testing, addressing each critical step.

Project planning templates for marketing and creative teams

7. Product marketing template: Plan your next launch

Product marketing managers handle market research, messaging, and product launches, often acting as project managers to coordinate across teams. Our product marketing launch template streamlines the process, with steps for setting launch targets and defining channel strategies. Plus, its duplicatable format ensures you never have to recreate a product launch checklist from scratch.

8. Editorial calendar template: Hit publishing deadlines

Managing a content calendar is an ongoing project that requires you to stay on top of many moving parts. Every piece of content you create is like its own mini project with clearly defined steps, like assigning work to writers, producing visual assets, and coordinating reviews and copy edits.

To keep your content production on track, try our editorial calendar template. With this template, you can manage all the content you’re writing, editing, and publishing in one place—from idea to completion. Our custom tags make it easy to track everything from the post’s due date and channel to important assets. It also lets you simplify your cross-team collaboration, bringing together your social media, PR, marketing, and design teams in one place.

9. Marketing campaign management template: Map out your campaign plan

Planning and execution are key to a great marketing campaign. But managing a campaign isn’t easy, and it can feel overwhelming to keep track of every piece of work that needs to get done. What assets need to be created? Who is going to create them? And what if something falls through the cracks?

With our marketing campaign management template, you can map out your entire campaign plan and manage day-to-day execution with your team. Use it to track assets and deliverables, plan and execute your channel strategy, and more.

10. Event marketing plan template: Map out your event marketing efforts

Building buzz is an important part of planning and organizing any event. Event marketing helps spread the word and generate excitement for your speakers and agenda—which in turn drives audience attendance. 

Asana’s event marketing plan template helps you organize your marketing plan for upcoming events. From planning the event all the way through day-of execution and post-event tasks, the template makes it easy for you to map out your promotional event efforts.

11. Marketing project plan template: Turn your strategy into action

Marketing projects are complex. No matter what type of project you’re planning—from launching a specific marketing campaign to mapping out your yearly marketing plan—there are a lot of steps and team members involved in making a marketing plan successful. 

Our marketing project plan template provides a place for you to detail your marketing objectives and the steps you need to take for them to be successful. Asana’s template makes it easy for you to communicate and collaborate across teams and jumpstarts productivity by removing the need for multiple spreadsheets or email threads.

12. Event planning template: Coordinate your events

There’s a lot that goes into planning a successful event. You have to manage everything from the event budget down to logistical details and day-of event tasks. The ability to see the event timeline—meaning every step that has to be completed for your event to launch successfully—is a must-have. 

Our event planning template makes planning and organizing events easy. With our template, you can visualize your event plan in a timeline, see task dependencies, and schedule milestones to track event progress. Plus, our mobile app lets you view your event plan from anywhere, so you can tick off day-of event tasks on the go. 

13. Public relations project plan: Create consistency across campaigns 

Running a successful PR campaign involves many small yet essential steps, often across multiple teams, making it challenging to determine responsibilities.

A public relations project plan template simplifies the process by organizing key information and improving team communication. This template acts as a step-by-step guide for launching and executing campaigns, ensuring consistency regardless of team size. It also serves as a centralized system to store important details like campaign information, journalist contacts, and resources.

14. Podcast planning template: Plan better episodes 

Looking to launch a successful podcast? Keeping your podcast plan organized is key. Building a digital podcast planning template streamlines your podcast planning process by giving you a single space to organize everything from your pre-production tasks to your post-production marketing efforts. 

Plus, you can easily duplicate the template at the start of your episode planning, ensuring that the structure of every episode is consistent. Use the template to house your podcast notes, the episode script, and more—like copy for promotional tweets. You can even collaborate with your episode guests directly in the template by using custom forms or assigning them specific tasks.  

15. Design project plan template: Streamline your creative process 

Web, graphic, and product design teams are a vital part of any business. From designing social and promotional assets to creating animations, videos, and web assets, a lot of what your customer sees—and what draws them in—comes from your design team. 

With so many responsibilities, it can be difficult to keep track of upcoming and in-progress design work. Plus, never-ending feedback chains and emails can stall progress. Our design project plan template makes it easy for you to streamline your creative project planning process. Easily collaborate, track files, and share asset updates and progress in one place.

Product, IT, and operations templates

16. Product roadmap template: Track your product initiatives

There’s a lot that goes into tracking the product features, initiatives, and updates your team plans to launch within a given timeframe. With our product roadmap template, you can easily track and monitor each status of each launch, and provide greater visibility to stakeholders around what’s launching and when. 

Plus, since our product roadmap template allows you to organize your launches by different variables—such as priority or overarching theme—everyone in your organization can see how each launch corresponds to the company’s goals.

17. User research template: Organize UXR projects

User research is vital to the product development process, helping teams understand customer needs and uncover new opportunities. Managing a research project involves sourcing participants, collecting and analyzing data, and generating recommendations.

Our user research template simplifies this by organizing research goals, questions, and observations, ensuring valuable insights aren’t lost in a document or Excel spreadsheet.

18. Product development plan template: Standardize the development process

Product development is the process of launching a new product, from ideation through the product launch. The entire product development process—which includes prototyping and testing—is complex and time-consuming. Add in the different teams you need for product development to be successful, and you have a recipe for a complicated process.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Creating a product development plan template streamlines your product development process, from coordinating cross-functional team communication to tracking development progress. Since it’s reusable, the template also helps standardize the workflow for future projects. 

19. Operations project plan template: Streamline business efficiency

The operations department is responsible for keeping business-critical processes running smoothly. Our operations project plan template helps you track key details by creating a single system of record for all your work. Since the template is reusable, it makes it easy to document recurring operational processes. Plus, you can assign work directly in the template, so everyone knows what they’re responsible for and can communicate where work is being done. 

20. IT project plan: Organize your IT work

Your IT team handles critical tasks like software deployments, equipment orders, and employee onboarding—all requiring scalability and security. Asana’s IT project plan template helps manage and organize these tasks efficiently. With customizable project permissions, you can help the right people access information, while over 200 integrations simplify collaboration across tools and teams.

21. Work requests template: Simplify the intake process

Work requests can quickly spiral out of control when they’re submitted through different avenues and in different formats. In order to make sure no requests are falling through the cracks, you need a central place to track and manage requests. And, to simplify the workflow for your team, you also need a project intake process to guarantee you’re getting the same information in each request.

Simply put, you need a work request template. Whether you’re receiving incoming creative briefs, work orders, or IT requests, having a single system of record for these requests is critical. Then, combine our work request template with Forms to guarantee you’re getting all of the critical details directly when requests are submitted.

22. Sales plan template: Set strong goals

Your sales and operation plan should be a living document, accessible and actionable throughout the sales cycle. To help your sales team build a strong foundation, they need a structured, finalized plan available where they work.

An effective sales plan template provides a centralized way to document objectives, target audiences, revenue goals, strategies, and potential obstacles. Use our template to create the structure you need to close deals efficiently.

Project plan templates for HR teams 

23. HR project plan template: Plan out HR work  

Your HR team is responsible for many processes and projects that empower employees and shape your organization’s culture. An HR project plan template makes it easy for you to plan and organize HR initiatives, track their progress, and manage priorities. Whether you’re launching new company goals, updating the hiring plan, or collecting employee feedback, Asana’s HR project plan template makes it easy to map out—and execute—your HR work. 

24. New employee onboarding: Standardize the onboarding process

Onboarding can be overwhelming for new hires, with systems to set up, documents to sign, and tasks to complete. An employee onboarding template streamlines this process, offering a single place for new hires to access tasks, reference documents, and team information. By outlining the entire onboarding process, the template sets clear expectations, ensuring a smoother experience for both the employee and the company.

25. Employee offboarding: Organize your offboarding process

Like employee onboarding, employee offboarding can be labor-intensive—and, unlike onboarding, it’s a process that’s often overlooked. An employee offboarding template can help you streamline your offboarding process. With a single place to map out your offboarding tasks—from the paperwork that needs to be completed to the work transition plan—you can easily track your offboarding process. Plus, since templates are duplicatable, you can feel confident that you’re following the same steps for every outgoing employee.

26. Conference agenda template: Plan seamless events

Planning a productive conference takes work. In addition to coordinating with speakers and vendors, you also have to keep track of event details, including when and where conference events are happening. 

A conference agenda template can help you plan effective conferences with ease. Whether you’re planning a one- or multi-day conference or a virtual event, creating a conference agenda template in Asana is a great starting point for capturing all the information you need to run the event smoothly.

Cross-functional project planning templates

27. Agile project plan template: Team collaboration made easy

Teams often struggle to collaborate in fast-paced environments, especially when changes cause delays in the project lifecycle. An Agile project plan template helps by enabling quick adjustments while maintaining focus on the project budget, project scope, and goals. It evolves with changing needs to help teams team members collaborate effectively.

28. Sprint planning template: Keep your team on the same page

Part of the larger Agile project process, sprint planning helps Agile project teams prioritize work and decide who has the capacity to take on certain projects. 

Your team is busy, and if you’re not communicating directly where work happens, it’s easy for team members to get confused about who’s working on what, what the status of the work is, and when the work is due. Our sprint planning template simplifies your sprint by creating a single system of record where everyone can see what’s coming up, what’s in progress, and what’s completed—freeing up time for your team to move quickly, build fast, and ship often.

29. Implementation plan template: Achieve business goals

Planning and achieving your business goals can feel overwhelming, but an implementation plan template simplifies the process. It breaks each goal into actionable steps, making it easy to monitor progress and track upcoming milestones. By including details like task duration and percent completed, the template provides clear visibility into every task’s status from planning to execution. 

30. Project timeline template: Visualize milestones and bottlenecks

Facing unexpected delays and struggling to track progress? A project timeline template can help. More than just start and end dates, it’s a project management tool that maps the entire project lifecycle, visualizing phases, key deliverables, and deadlines.

By clearly showing project progress, this template identifies bottlenecks and provides regular updates for comprehensive status reports, improving communication with stakeholders. A well-used project timeline template restores transparency and acts as a visual dashboard for efficient project execution.

Better project templates mean better project planning

Kicking off a new project can be stressful, especially if you’re the one in charge of planning and managing that project. Reusable product templates make planning easier by standardizing your project processes, facilitating cross-team collaboration, and reducing upfront work. 

FAQs about project plan templates