Core concepts
Activity templates
What an activity template holds, how Draft and Active differ, who can change one, what publishing checks, and how a project takes its own copy.
- Admin
- PM
An activity template is the starting plan for one kind of project: its activities and sub-activities, how long each takes, what each one waits for, which team does it and the tasks that complete it. Every new project starts from an Active template, picked in step 3 of + New project.
Templates live under Activity Templates in the left menu. You see that page when your page access gives Templates View or Action. A good template saves every PM from building the same plan by hand, so it is worth keeping templates complete and current.
What a template holds
Each template has a name, a type (Innovation Class A, Innovation Class B, Renovation Class A, Renovation Class B, White Label or Hybrid), an optional short description, a list of activities, and a linked document storage structure.
- Activities and sub-activities. An activity can have up to 10 sub-activities, one level deep. An activity has either tasks or sub-activities, never both: a parent takes its team and tasks from its sub-activities.
- Duration. Whole days, at least 1. A parent's duration is the span of its sub-activities, from the earliest start to the latest finish, not their sum.
- Predecessors. What an activity waits for. Every link is finish-to-start (FS), with an optional lag in days.
- Team. Every activity without sub-activities needs a team. When a project is created, its owner is picked from that team.
- Non-mandatory. An activity the plan can do without. It can never be a predecessor of another activity.
- Tasks. What the owner does to complete the activity. See Task types.
The list shows each template's Project duration (CPM): the length of its critical path in days. That figure is the template's allowance. A new project whose calculated schedule runs longer goes to its approvers before it can start.
Finds a template by its name or description.
Show only Draft or Active templates, or one project type.
Opens a short form: name, short description, type and Start from (Blank, or a copy of an existing template). Shown only with Templates: Action.
Type, status, activity count, CPM duration, creator and last edit. Click the row to open the template.
Draft while it is being built, Active once its creator has published it.
The folder structure this template's documents are filed under. ⚠ Not set means none is linked yet.
Copies the template into a new Draft that you own. Edit and Delete appear here too, but only on templates you created.
Draft and Active
| Status | What it means | Can a new project use it? |
|---|---|---|
| Draft | Every new template starts here. It is still being built. | No. The project wizard lists only Active templates. |
| Active | Published by its creator. It can still be edited by its creator. | Yes, as long as it passes the publish checks. |
Publishing is one way: an Active template never goes back to Draft. There is no version history either. A template is one plan, and its creator changes it in place.
When the creator edits an Active template, each change saves as it is made and applies to projects created from then on. An edit can leave it incomplete for a while, for example a new activity with no task yet. The editor then lists the problems under Not usable for new projects until this is fixed, and a PM who picks the template in the wizard is refused until they are fixed.
The creator can also delete a template. The confirmation says how many projects used it. Those projects keep their own copy and are not affected; the template is no longer offered for new projects.
Who can create, edit and publish
Two things decide what you can do with a template: your Templates page access, and whether you created it.
| Your access | What you can do |
|---|---|
| Templates: None | Activity Templates is not in your menu. |
| Templates: View | See every template, Draft or Active, read-only. |
| Templates: Action, not the creator | Create new templates. Open someone else's template read-only, and Duplicate it. |
| Templates: Action, the creator | Edit it, whether Draft or Active. Publish it while it is a Draft. Delete it. Duplicate it. |
Being an admin gives no extra rights here: someone with User Management: Action sees another person's template read-only, like everyone else.
Duplicate copies every activity, sub-activity, predecessor and task, and the linked document storage, into a new Draft that you own. It is named after the original with “(copy)” added. Later edits to either template do not affect the other.
The template editor
Click a template to open the editor. The status pill sits next to its name, and Filter above the table narrows the rows by team, Non-mandatory only or Has tasks. The creator sees Changes save automatically at the top: activity edits save as you make them, while name, type and description have their own Save button.
On someone else's Active template: only its creator can edit it. The creator sees instead that changes apply to projects created from now on.
Makes your own Draft copy of an Active template, which you can then change.
The structure Document Upload tasks pick their documents from. Only Active structures are listed. Manage all → opens Document Storage.
Activities are numbered 1, 2, 3 and sub-activities 3.1, 3.2. An ID is never reused, even after a delete, so gaps are expected.
What the activity waits for, written as ID, FS and any lag, for example 3 FS+2.
Who does the work. A parent shows “—”: its team is set on its sub-activities.
Ticked when the plan can do without the activity. Such an activity cannot be a predecessor.
One chip per task, such as Document Upload or Check / Reject. The creator opens the task drawer from here.
Rules the editor enforces
- The first activity, and the first sub-activity under it, cannot have predecessors. “First” means the row order now, not the ID.
- A parent and its own sub-activity never depend on each other, and a circular dependency is refused with its path named.
- A non-mandatory activity is not offered as a predecessor. Marking a parent non-mandatory marks all its sub-activities too, after a confirmation.
- Deleting an activity that others wait on: the editor names them and, when you confirm, removes it from their predecessors. An activity whose document another task reviews, or that a rejection route points at, cannot be deleted until that task changes.
Task types
- Document Upload
- The owner uploads one file for each named document. You pick each document by folder, subfolder and name from the linked document storage, and set Visible to (which other teams see it) and the Visibility trigger: On upload, On check or On approval.
- Checkbox
- Items to tick. On a mandatory activity, at least one item must be mandatory.
- Field Input
- Fields to fill in. On a mandatory activity, at least one field must be mandatory.
- Check / Reject
- Reviews a document that an earlier activity uploads. On rejection is either Go back to a specific activity (hardcoded) or Task owner decides at runtime.
- Approve / Reject
- The same, for approval. A document has at most one Check / Reject and one Approve / Reject, and the check comes before the approval.
What publishing checks
The creator sees Publish template on a Draft. It asks you to confirm, then checks the whole template at once. If anything fails, a notice titled This template can't be published yet lists every problem, so you can fix them all before trying again.
- The template has no activities.
- An activity without sub-activities has no team.
- An activity without sub-activities has no tasks. Every such activity needs at least one, non-mandatory ones included.
- A mandatory activity has a Checkbox or Field Input task with no mandatory item.
- The first row, or its first sub-activity, has a predecessor.
- A non-mandatory activity is a predecessor of another activity.
Save any unsaved name, type or description first; otherwise publishing stops with Save the template details first. The same checks run again whenever a PM picks the template for a new project.
The linked document storage
Document Upload tasks file their documents under one document storage structure, chosen in Document storage template at the top of the editor. Only Active structures are offered. Until one is chosen, the editor warns Select a Document Storage template before configuring Document Upload tasks.
While any template uses a structure, its folders and documents can be added to but not renamed or deleted. See Document storage and project documents.
How a project uses a template
In step 3 of project creation the wizard lists every Active template with its activity count and duration. Picking one copies its activities, sub-activities, predecessors and tasks into the draft. Picking a different template replaces that copy.
The template also sets the project's type, and its CPM duration becomes the project's allowance. If the schedule the PM calculates runs past it, the project goes to its approvers first. See Approvals.
From then on the project and the template are independent. Editing a template never changes a project that was already created, or a draft that already picked it. The one thing they share is the document storage structure: a project's Documents tab files documents under the folders of its template's structure.