Best Practices for Applying Action Plan Template Changes

Overview

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Updating a template lets you push improvements to hundreds of active plans at once. Because changes can affect live work and clear certain signatures, using these best practices will help keep your project running smoothly without surprising your team.

Prepare Your Team First

  • Give your team a heads-up: Let Plan Managers and assignees know before you update a template. Tell them what is changing and remind them that plan approvals will need to be signed again.

  • Check for items you plan to delete: Updating a template will apply edits to open items, even if they have progress. However, if your template edits include deleting items or sections, Procore will skip the deletion on any item that already has progress (signatures, attachments, or a non-default status). To remove those items, field teams must clear the progress first.

  • Pick a quiet time to update: Apply changes when the team isn't actively working in the tool to avoid confusing anyone while they are trying to sign off on tasks.

Know How Template Changes Work

Change You Make

What Happens to Active Plans

What You Should Do

Adding new items

Adds the new item to all open plans.

Make sure the new item is placed correctly around completed steps.

Deleting items

Deletes the item only if no work has started on it.

If work has already started, update that item directly in the plan instead.

Moving items around

Reorders items only if no work has started on them.

Avoid large layout changes on older templates where work is already underway.

Changing plan signers

Clears the Approver and Receiver signatures on open plans.

Re-collect these plan approvals right after you make the update.

Review Your Results

  • Check your email for the summary report: After you apply changes, Procore emails you a spreadsheet report (Bulk Edit Report).

    • Look at the Summary tab to make sure all your plans were updated.

    • Look at the Field Changes tab and filter by Skipped to see which items were left alone because work had already started.

  • Watch out for the 1,000-plan limit: Procore can update up to 1,000 plans at one time (starting with the newest). If you have more than 1,000 active plans, check your report to see if you need to run the update again for older plans.

  • Verify using Change History: You can open any individual plan and check its Change History tab to see a clear list of every update made by the template.

See Also

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