Project Management Template
A board structure that survives contact with real work: a place for new requests to land, limits that stop everything being in progress at once, and a decision log that doesn't drift from the tasks.
Column limits are the part most templates leave out, and the part that works.
Why most project templates stop being used
A template is only worth anything if the board still reflects reality in week six. Most fail for the same three reasons, and this one is built to avoid them.
There is nowhere for new work to land. Requests arrive as messages, get remembered or forgotten, and the board describes only the work someone happened to write down. This template starts with a triage column, so an incoming request has a destination that isn't somebody's memory.
Everything is in progress at once. Without a limit, "in progress" becomes a list of things that have been started and abandoned. Column limits force finishing before starting, which feels restrictive for about a week and then noticeably increases throughput.
Decisions live somewhere else. The reason a thing was built one way ends up in chat, and six weeks later nobody can reconstruct it. A decision log next to the work keeps the two together.
The structure, and why each part is there
One column where every new request lands, from any source. Triage is a deliberate decision: scheduled, rejected, or parked, rather than something that happens by whoever shouts loudest.
A cap on how many items may sit in each stage. When a column is full, the team finishes something before pulling more. This is the single highest-leverage part of the template, and it's the one most teams are tempted to skip.
Planning against who is actually available, with approved leave and out-of-office accounted for, not against headcount, which is how plans end up wrong on the first day.
A wiki page per project recording what was decided and why, with page history. Any sentence can become a task, so a decision doesn't quietly fail to get implemented.
A one-tap route to raise a blocker with context attached, so it lands on the board rather than in a DM that nobody else can see.
Written into the board rather than assumed. Most disputes about whether something is finished are really disputes about a definition nobody wrote down.
How to use it
- 01Start a workspace. It opens in about a minute with a sample project already on the board, so you can see the structure working before you put real work in it. Free for up to five people, permanently.
- 02Set your column limits low. Lower than feels comfortable. A team of five rarely needs more than three items genuinely in progress. You can always raise them; teams almost never do.
- 03Route every request through triage. The template only works if there is no side door. Agreeing that "asked in chat" is not a request is most of the battle.
- 04Write the definition of done before the first sprint, not after the first argument.
- 05Turn on time logging once the board is trusted. On ShipSprint that's a five-second log next to the task someone just finished, so it's easy enough that people actually keep doing it. Hours logged against a board nobody believes produce numbers nobody believes.
The structure isn't proprietary; you can rebuild it in any tool that supports column limits. It's reproduced here because the parts teams tend to leave out are exactly the parts that make it work.
- A single place for new work to land beats a well-organised board with a side door
- Column limits are the difference between a board and a list of things somebody started
- Decisions kept next to the work stay findable; decisions kept in chat don't
Common questions
Yes. All project templates are included on the Free plan, which covers up to five users and two projects and doesn't expire. Larger teams need a paid plan for the seats, not for the templates. See pricing.
Yes. Columns, limits and the definition of done are all editable. The template is a sensible starting point, not a constraint. Teams running a continuous flow often drop the sprint boundary and keep everything else.
The structure transfers directly. HR, marketing and operations get their own templates with their own vocabulary (candidates, campaigns, requests) on the same underlying board, all inside one subscription.
Related pages
See it on your own work.
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