Streamline your project management with 12 free project documentation templates. Build project documents for budgets, goals, communications, and risks effortlessly.
Shreelekha Singh August 29, 2024
Most people brush off project documentation as meaningless paperwork. In reality, companies waste close to 12 percent of their resources if they don’t have solid project management and documentation.
Effective documentation clearly defines project goals and milestones, establishes realistic timelines, lists the final deliverables, and enables performance tracking through relevant metrics.
It can be the difference between a failure and a successful project. So it’s time for you to get started.
We’ve put together a set of 12 project documentation templates to do the heavy lifting on your behalf.
Project documentation includes a collection of documents for different aspects of the project, like budgets, goal-setting, performance tracking, risk management and more.
These documents ensure everything goes as planned and reduce the risk of budget overruns, changes in direction and conflicts.
Successful documentation brings transparency into the work and centralizes all project information. This lowers the chances of anything going off track and gives teams the resources to handle any unexpected hiccups.
Project managers can document any information they consider crucial to a project.
While there’s no fixed set of documents, we’ve created a list of 12 must-have project documentation templates for any project.
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A project charter outlines a preliminary layout of the project, listing the:
A team charter validates the new project and gives project managers a formal nod to start planning.
Since a charter is created at the start of a project, it doesn't cover much ground. Instead, it serves as a starting point where all stakeholders agree to kick off the project with an end goal and timeline for finishing it.
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The project scope statement offers a high-level overview of the project, covering its:
Besides the essential details, a project scope statement also highlights what isn’t in the project to prevent scope creep — where some stakeholders demand extra work beyond the original plan of action.
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Whether you are a seasoned project manager or just starting out, this project plan template provides a step-by-step approach to creating a solid project plan. Use this project plan template to:
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Use this project schedule template to streamline the planning process:
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Think of a work breakdown structure (WBS)as a step-by-step guide for any project. A WBS is a crucial part of project documentation to delegate responsibilities to all internal stakeholders and improve teamwork.
Use Scribe's work breakdown structure maker to:
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Standard operating procedures (SOPs) are important because they define the best way to perform an action or task. Companies create SOPs for all routine processes to improve consistency and productivity.
Use this SOP template to:
👉 Try this SOP template for free.
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Tailor this communication plan template to develop a comprehensive plan to keep all project stakeholders informed and engaged:
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Use this change management plan template to outline the processes, procedures and resources required to make changes to a project.
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Build a detailed roadmap to execute, monitor and control even the most complicated project with this project management plan template:
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Streamline documentation with our customizable project documentation template:
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This project handover template ensures a smooth transition of a project from one team or the party responsible to another. Use it to outline:
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If you're looking to create documentation for an IT or software project, use this IT documentation template as an easy-to-use framework for documenting:
Try from 100+ free process documentation templates in the Scribe template gallery.
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Use these templates to:
. all for half the time in effort.
With so many moving parts in a project, project managers might think documentation is an extra — and unnecessary — step.
But the project documentation process puts everyone on the same page and creates seamless workflows for repeatable success.
If you're still not sold on the importance of project documentation, here are five project documentation benefits to help you make the right decision.
Proper documentation simplifies planning from the start. It allows project teams to consolidate inputs from multiple stakeholders and create a solid plan of action to hit desired goals.
Teams can also work faster by creating an extensive roadmap and a list of deliverables beforehand.
Documents like a work breakdown structure and standard operation procedure (SOPs) can clarify every aspect of the project. These documents capture the most important project knowledge to prevent mistakes and enhance the project team’s efficiency.
The right documentation brings greater accountability — so you can objectively assess team performance and find areas of improvement. This allows the team to consistently succeed and keeps the project from derailing off its course.
Documenting critical details prepares the project team to complete the work without any bottlenecks or changes. This allows team members to work more collaboratively with higher productivity and achieve a greater success rate.
When you properly document every project detail, there’s little to no chance of information getting lost in translation. Documents ensure that all project knowledge — from meetings to SOPs — is available for everyone to view and use at any point.
Your project proposal is approved and you're all set to start a massive project with your team — slightly nervous, slightly excited. But before starting with the actual work, you have to create a framework for documenting all the project details.
The most important thing to remember for any project is that the project documentation process isn’t a one-and-done.
It's a consistent requirement for every project phase. So, keep documenting your progress throughout the project in different formats, like work breakdown structure, SOPs, project status reports, and issue logs.
More importantly, you have to update your project documents regularly based on inputs and feedback from different stakeholders.
And if end-user preferences differ from your original plans, make sure to change the deliverables and modify your documents accordingly.
Most project documentation ignores the readers’ perspective. For instance, a long and jargon-filled project status report makes it difficult for other stakeholders to understand and share their feedback.
So, when documenting any detail about the project, keep the end-users in mind and use reader-friendly language and presentation. It’s best to break down large chunks of text into shorter paragraphs and bullet points to improve the document’s scannability.
To keep your documents updated at all times, design a workflow for constantly auditing and modifying all documents. Ideally, this involves a team-wide survey of 1:1 interviews with specific stakeholders to understand the documents’ accuracy and utility.
Carefully analyze feedback to chalk out the scope of improvement. Make relevant changes to ensure the documents align with the project goals.
Tracking old and new versions isn’t easy when you update your documents. Things become even more challenging when multiple people are involved in the project documentation process.
A correctly laid out version control process streamlines the task of updating any document. It tracks and stores all the versions to display only the latest version for the end readers.
You can create version control guidelines on naming an updated document. Usual naming standards include:
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Over the span of a project, you’ll probably realize that critical information is scattered all over your emails, meetings and chats.
Project documentation tools can curate all this information on a single platform and offer easy accessibility to everyone.
AI-powered tools like Scribe simplify your project documentation process and create interactive step-by-step instructions in seconds.
Simply click "Start Capture" and go through your process. When you're done, Scribe will auto-generate a step-by-step guide with text, clicks and annotated screenshots.
Use Scribe Pages to combine your guides, and add images, videos, GIFs, hyperlinks and more, like this one:
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You can even ask the AI to write project documents for you — just select the Scribes you want to include to make your process document specific to your company's processes and tools.
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When you’re done, sharing your project documents is simple and quick:
Don't just take our word for it. Scribe user Will Stevenson says,
"Scribe is by far the fastest way to create help documentation that I've found. Literally 10x's the speed of manually creating documentation. We love it so much that we recommend it to all of our customers and even embed it in our product."
Project documentation isn’t the most exciting part of a manager's responsibility — but it is important.
With so much information floating between stakeholders, putting everything on paper and creating comprehensive documents can seem overwhelming. But it doesn't have to be.
