IT program management template

Managing IT programs is no small task. When resources are limited and companies are focused on protecting their bottom line, keeping multiple projects coordinated and on track is a real challenge.

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.

What is IT program management?

IT program management means coordinating several related IT projects so they support your organization’s bigger goals. While one IT project might launch a new tool or fix a problem, a program groups these projects together to achieve bigger, strategic results.

IT project management vs. IT program management

• Scope: IT project management focuses on a single project with defined start and end dates. IT program management brings multiple related projects under one umbrella.

• Focus: IT project management centers on delivering specific outputs on time and on budget. IT program management connects project outcomes to larger strategic goals.

• Key responsibility: IT project management handles tasks, timelines, and resources. IT program management handles dependencies, shared resources, and stakeholder coordination.

For example, an IT program might include projects to upgrade your company's security infrastructure, migrate to a new cloud platform, and train employees on new tools. Each project has its own timeline and team, but they all connect to a shared goal: modernizing your technology stack.

Program managers are responsible for keeping the full picture in focus. Their core responsibilities include:

• Managing dependencies: Identifying where projects overlap or rely on one another

• Aligning resources: Distributing team members, budgets, and tools across projects

• Keeping stakeholders informed: Communicating progress and risks to leadership and cross-functional teams

What is an IT program management template?

An IT program management template is a reusable guide that helps teams plan, prioritize, and carry out 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 review and prioritize 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. 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 various ways, including task lists, Gantt charts, calendars, and Kanban boards.

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

• Attach relevant screenshots, documents, and spreadsheets.

What to include in an IT program management template

Every IT program management template should include these core components to keep your team aligned from the start:

• Program scope and goals: Define what the program will accomplish and how it connects to your company's broader goals. This keeps everyone aligned from the start.

• Stakeholder map: Identify the people and teams involved, including decision-makers, contributors, and anyone who needs to stay informed. Clarifying roles early reduces confusion later.

• Project list and dependencies: Outline the program's individual projects and note their dependencies. This helps you anticipate bottlenecks before they slow things down.

• Timeline and milestones: Set key dates for each project and for the program as a whole. Milestones give your team checkpoints to measure progress against.

• Resource allocation: Document how team members, budget, and tools are distributed across projects. This makes it easier to balance workloads and avoid over-commitment.

• Risk management plan: Identify potential risks in a risk register and outline how your team will address them. Having a plan in place means you can respond quickly when issues come up.

• Communication plan: Define how and when you'll share updates with stakeholders. Consistent communication keeps everyone informed and builds trust across teams.

Including these components in your template gives your team a repeatable process that saves time and reduces the chance of important details falling through the cracks.

Types of IT program management templates

IT program management encompasses all your ongoing IT projects, so it's hard to create a single template that covers everything. Take a look at some specific use cases we use at Asana, along with 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 IT planning involves many stakeholders. Business leaders set budgets and company goals, while individual teams request new tools and IT support. You need to bring all of that input together during planning. An annual planning template creates a predefined workflow to help you navigate 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 it up 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. That means when a certain trigger is activated, a series of actions is 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

Learn how to create an incident management template, and then use automations to help your team respond as rapidly and effectively as possible.

Tool offboarding 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.”

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 for each task based on the assignee's response. If we determine the tool isn't needed anymore, we launch the tool's 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.

IT roadmap template

When you're managing multiple IT initiatives at once, organization is everything. An IT roadmap template helps your team understand how current projects, upgrades, and infrastructure changes connect to larger company goals.

At Asana, we use our IT roadmap template to visualize ongoing projects and future initiatives in one place. This template allows our team to track dependencies, allocate resources, and communicate timelines to stakeholders.

Use this template to:

• Map out technology initiatives by quarter or fiscal year.

• Track progress on infrastructure upgrades and key milestones.

• Coordinate IT priorities with company goals and upcoming launches.

• Share a single, high-level view with executives and cross-functional teams.

With a detailed roadmap in place, your IT team can make better strategic decisions and anticipate future needs without losing sight of day-to-day operations.

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 busywork 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.

• Forms. When someone fills out a Form, it appears as a new task in an Asana project. By taking information via a Form, you can standardize how work gets kicked off, gather the information you need, and ensure nothing falls through the cracks. Or, use branching logic to tailor questions based on a user's previous answer.

• Workflow Builder. Visualize your team's workflow and simplify cross-team collaboration with Workflow Builder. This no-code point-and-click tool helps you build powerful automated workflows that connect teams across your organization. Plus, integrate your favorite business apps, like Slack, 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 scheduling 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. This integration makes it easy to connect ServiceNow to actions and updates taken in Asana.

• Zendesk. With the Zendesk integration, users can quickly create Asana tasks directly from Zendesk tickets. Add context, attach files, and link existing tasks to track work needed to close out the ticket.

• Jira. Create interactive, connected workflows between technical and business teams to increase real-time visibility into the product development process, all without leaving Asana. Quickly create Jira issues directly in Asana, so work flows seamlessly between teams at the right time.

• Slack. Turn ideas, work requests, and action items from Slack into Asana tasks and comments that are trackable. Easily capture work so requests and to-dos don't get lost in Slack.

Start managing IT programs more efficiently

With the right templates in place, your IT team can spend less time figuring out how to start projects and more time moving them forward. Whether you're coordinating annual planning, responding to incidents, or mapping your technology roadmap, a solid template provides a repeatable process that keeps everyone aligned.

Get started with Asana to build IT program management templates that help your team deliver faster.

FAQs about IT program management templates