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Linked Sub Templates (Parent/Child Templates)

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Level 6

6/13/19

We have a lot of Templates that contain many subsets of the same exact tasks. It's very brittle and time consuming when we change the way we do one of those subsets of tasks, because now it has to be changed in more than one place (sometimes a lot more).


It would be less brittle, if instead you could make smaller templates, and embed/link those in other templates (having parent templates). If you change a linked template, it then updates it in every parent template that contains it. There could be an option to unlink it (in a parent template). The parent template would override any project / form values that conflict.


Some of us currently do use smaller sub templates, and when creating a project use 'attach template' over and over to bring in the sub-templates - this gets annoying though and requires re-arranging tasks and so many of our project managers create forked templates with those items already included. A linked/child/referenced template within a larger template would be much easier to work with.


1 Comment

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Level 3

6/14/19

I've been using/building Workfront for our environment for about three months. I came in when they had launched a month prior, so many templates had already been built. So it took me two months to realize that perhaps smaller templates should have been created with these recurring tasks, and then those used to build the larger templates. But since I have not started building those, I have no reference to how cumbersome it might be to have to import each smaller template into the larger. So this idea seems like a good one - I'll give it my vote.


Even better though, for me... I would like to be able to build a bank of tasks with assigned duration and planned hours, and then be able to drag and drop those tasks into a template. This would allow us to utilize those recurring tasks quite easily from project to project, and still have the ability to change them as needed for future use.