The Scenario
You are a customer success operations manager. You have standardized the company's onboarding methodology into six phases — Discovery, Technical Setup, Data Migration, Training, UAT, and Go-Live — each with a defined duration and a start offset from project kick-off.
That template lives on the Onboarding Phases tab of an Excel workbook. Column A is phase name, B is the start offset in days from the project start date (which is in cell A1), C is the duration in days. The new Rocketlane project ID is in cell B1.
Now you need to add all six phases to the project. The Rocketlane UI wants you to create each one individually, setting the date math by hand.
What that looks like:
- Open the project in Rocketlane
- Click "Add Phase," type the name, calculate the start date from the offset, enter the duration
- Save. Click "Add Phase" again
- Calculate the next offset, realize you made an arithmetic error on phase three
- Correct it. Continue
- Six phases, forty-five minutes, two date errors.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI reads your phase template from the workbook and applies it to the Rocketlane project in one go.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Add all 6 phases from the Onboarding Phases tab to Rocketlane project ID listed in cell B1 — phase name in column A, start offset in days from the project start date in cell A1 in column B, duration in days in column C.
SheetXAI reads the project start date from A1, resolves the offset for each phase, calculates start and end dates, and creates all six phases under the project in sequence. No date math. No manual UI work.
What You Get
Six Rocketlane phases, added to the project in one prompt:
- Phase name — from column A of the Onboarding Phases tab
- Start date — calculated from the project start date in A1 plus the offset in column B
- End date — derived from the start date plus the duration in column C
- Sequential structure — phases land in the order they appear in the tab
The template is reusable. Next time a new project lands, update B1 with the new project ID, update A1 with the new start date, and run the same prompt.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Phase templates evolve.
When some phases have conditional durations
The UAT phase runs 10 days for enterprise customers and 5 days for SMB. The tier is in cell C1.
Read the customer tier from cell C1 of the Onboarding Phases tab. If "Enterprise," set the UAT phase duration to 10 days. If "SMB," set it to 5 days. Then create all phases for project ID in cell B1 using the offsets in column B and durations in column C.
When the template has a phase the project does not need
Some projects skip Data Migration because the customer has no legacy data. A flag in cell D1 indicates whether to include it.
If cell D1 in the Onboarding Phases tab says "No Migration," skip the Data Migration row. Create all other phases under project ID in cell B1 with start offsets from column B and durations from column C.
When phase names need to match Rocketlane's naming conventions
Your workbook uses internal shorthand that does not match Rocketlane's phase name format.
Before creating each phase, map the name in column A to the canonical Rocketlane phase name: "Disco" → "Discovery," "Tech Setup" → "Technical Setup," "Mig" → "Data Migration," "Training" → "Customer Training," "UAT" → "User Acceptance Testing," "GL" → "Go-Live." Then create each phase under project ID in cell B1 with the mapped name.
When you need phases created across multiple new projects at once
You just created twelve projects from the Deals tab and all of them need the same phase structure.
Read the project IDs from column F and project start dates from column D of the Deals tab. For each project, create the six phases defined in the Onboarding Phases tab — phase name from column A, offset from column B, duration from column C — using the corresponding project start date as the base.
One prompt, twelve projects, seventy-two phases.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open a workbook with your phase template, then ask it to add the phases to an existing Rocketlane project. The Rocketlane integration is included in every plan. For the next step, see how to bulk-create tasks from an implementation playbook or the Rocketlane in Excel overview.