In Chapter 4, Creating a New Project and Work Breakdown Structure, we walked through the steps of manually setting up a brand new project. While creating a project, there are several important steps involved, and creating a full project from scratch can take a good deal of time. Project templates help you create new projects by providing a common set of project properties and items that can be used to create new projects quickly. This will allow you to get right to implementing your project plan.
For example, you may have a number of WBS elements that are commonly used in every project. You can create a template that contains these elements. When you generate a new project from this template, the WBS elements will be added automatically. Similarly, you can take an existing project and convert it into a template. This allows you to take successful projects from the past and use them as a blueprint for future work.