IT program management template

Managing IT programs is no small task. It’s hard to drive digital transformation when resources are limited, especially when companies are focused on protecting their bottom line.

But in reality, better processes and tools are the key to unlocking business efficiency. With streamlined workflows and more efficient program management, IT teams can do more with less. You can improve security, quickly manage incidents, and ensure employees have the tools they need—without missing a beat. 

To make your processes more efficient, start with an IT program management template. 

What is an IT program management template? 

An IT program management template is a reusable guide that helps teams plan, prioritize, and execute IT projects. Templates standardize how teams approach key workflows like incident management, software offboarding, or IT requests. They promote consistent practices across your organization, so it’s clear how cross-functional stakeholders should work with IT—and vice versa. 

Instead of starting new IT projects from scratch, teams can copy the template and follow a predefined process—checking every box along the way. 

Why use a digital IT program management template?

IT program management is a living, breathing process. You need to triage and assign requests, communicate with stakeholders, remove blockers, and resolve incidents in real time. When projects and requests are constantly in flux, static Excel spreadsheets or Google Sheets quickly become outdated. But with a work management platform like Asana, you can see and manage work right as it happens.

Here’s what you can do with a digital IT program management template: 

• Create a single system of record for all IT work. 

• Quickly see each project’s status, and remove blockers as needed. 

• Automate IT workflows, so your team can spend less time managing tasks and more time on mission-critical work. 

• Integrate other tools—like ServiceNow and Jira—into your Asana workflows, so you can track information in one place.

• Share status reports with stakeholders without putting in extra work. 

• Switch between project views to visualize IT workflows and roadmaps in different ways—such as task lists, Gantt charts, calendars, or Kanban boards. 

• Easily update project schedules, statuses, and owners as circumstances change.

• Attach relevant screenshots, documents, and spreadsheets. 

Types of IT program management templates

IT program management encompasses all of your ongoing IT projects, so it’s hard to create a single template for everything. Take a look at some specific use cases we utilize at Asana—plus how to set them up.

IT annual planning template

Without a controlled intake system in place, needs might be unclear and key information might be left out. To provide a better customer experience and improve the quality of data collected, we use Asana Forms.”

Annual planning for IT involves lots of stakeholders. Business leaders set budgets and company objectives, while individual teams request new tools and IT support—and you need to bring all of that input together during planning. An annual planning template creates a predefined workflow to help you navigate all these relationships. It outlines who you should loop in at each step, what decisions need to be made, and how your team should move forward. 

At Asana, we use a standardized annual planning intake form to manage new project requests for our IT team. After stakeholders submit the form, their requests are automatically added to an annual planning project, and the appropriate team members are notified and looped in.

Here are some key fields to include on your form:  

• Requester name

• Requesting department

• Project name

• Project description

• Project deliverables

• Project timeline

• Pain points or problems this project will solve

• Workarounds you’re currently doing to address these pain points

Once you create your form, set up automations to instantly add new requests to your annual planning project and assign follow-up tasks to the appropriate stakeholders. For example, you can assign follow-up tasks for an initial assessment, cost-benefit analysis, and approvals. 

IT incident management template

By using Rules and building these custom workflows, we’ve taken incident management from a stressful uncertain element of work to something that’s controlled, fairly easily managed, and rapidly dealt with.”

When IT incidents happen, the pressure is on. Standardized workflows give your team a clear path forward—so you can take action quickly and decisively. 

At Asana, we’ve streamlined our incident management process with automations. That means when a certain trigger is activated, a series of actions are performed automatically. For example, we’ve set up automations to: 

• Automatically log incidents when they occur

• Route incidents to the right team and the right person

• Alert managers and support leads based on the impacted area

• Track service level agreements (SLAs)

• Create follow-up tasks for postmortem meetings

Tool offboarding template

Having a clearly defined workflow within Asana allows us to coordinate stakeholders, notify users, ensure an end of financial responsibility, archive or preserve business-critical data, and ensure that any Asana data on the platform has been securely removed.”

It’s up to IT teams to determine when applications no longer serve an important purpose at your company—and then to offboard those apps when needed. Having a predefined tool offboarding process in place can help your team tie up loose ends and make the transition as smooth as possible for the entire business.

At Asana, we use several strategies to monitor tool usage and phase out unhelpful applications: 

1. Bulk task creation: When thinking about offboarding a tool, it’s important to know who’s using it. At Asana, our IT team bulk assigns tasks to all app users to confirm if—and how—they’re using the tool. This gives us a clear understanding of how teams use the tool under evaluation.

2. Automations: We then use automations to trigger actions on each task based on how the assignee responds. If we identify that the tool isn’t needed anymore, we launch the tool offboarding process. 

3. Forms: Offboarding a tool involves many stakeholders, from legal to IT operations. We kick off the process with an Asana form. Based on form responses, we can automatically assign follow-up tasks to the right people. 

4. Dependencies: During the offboarding process, we use dependencies to automatically notify stakeholders when they’re unblocked and can begin work. This helps move the process along faster by reducing ambiguity and time-consuming check-ins. 

Recommended features and integrations

As you build out your IT program management templates, customize your team’s workflows with these features and app integrations.

Integrated features

• Automation. Automate manual work so your team spends less time on the busy work and more time on the tasks you hired them for. Rules in Asana function on a basis of triggers and actions—essentially “when X happens, do Y.” Use Rules to automatically assign work, adjust due dates, set custom fields, notify stakeholders, and more. From ad hoc automations to entire workflows, Rules gives your team time back for skilled and strategic work.

• Forms. When someone fills out a Form, it shows up as a new task within an Asana project. By intaking information via a Form, you can standardize the way work gets kicked off, gather the information you need, and ensure no work falls through the cracks. Instead of treating each request as an ad hoc process, create a standardized system and set of questions that everyone has to answer. Or, use branching logic to tailor questions based on a user’s previous answer.  

• Workflow Builder. Visualize your team’s workflow and simplify collaboration across teams with Workflow Builder. Workflow Builder is a no-code point-and-click tool that helps you visualize and build powerful automated workflows. Easily create effective processes that connect teams across all levels and pillars of your organization. Plus, streamline tasks and keep your teammates in sync by integrating your favorite business apps—like Slack, Adobe Creative Cloud, Salesforce, Zoom, and more—right into your workflows. 

• Portfolios. Portfolios make it easy to organize and track all of your team's multiple projects in a single view. Get a high-level overview of how all your projects are progressing, then drill in for more details to address risks. Plus, share status updates across programs and keep stakeholders up to date without having to schedule a status meeting.

Recommended apps

• ServiceNow. Reduce manual work for IT teams working in ServiceNow by automating task creation in Asana and providing cross-platform visibility into real-time status and context. Internal-facing service teams that use ServiceNow to track and manage employee tickets often receive requests that require actions outside ServiceNow, like fulfilling hardware requests, or responding to a payroll question. This integration makes it easy to connect ServiceNow to actions and updates taken in Asana.

• Zendesk. With Asana's Zendesk integration, users can quickly and easily create Asana tasks directly from Zendesk tickets. Add context, attach files, and link existing tasks to track work needed to close out the ticket. The integration also provides continuing visibility across both systems, so everyone is kept up to speed regardless of which tool they use. 

• Jira. Create interactive, connected workflows between technical and business teams to increase visibility around the product development process in real time—all without leaving Asana. Streamline project collaboration and hand offs. Quickly create Jira issues from within Asana so that work passes seamlessly between business and technical teams at the right time. 

• Slack. Turn ideas, work requests, and action items from Slack into trackable tasks and comments in Asana. Go from quick questions and action items to tasks with assignees and due dates. Easily capture work so requests and to-dos don’t get lost in Slack. 

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