Project Charter
A guided form covering scope, objectives, stakeholders, risks and success criteria, which outputs a formatted charter in Word or PDF.
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Why and what
Purpose
neededWhy this is being done, in a few sentences somebody outside the team would understand.
The problem
What is wrong today. Written as what happens, not as the absence of your solution.
Objectives
neededWhat this project will achieve. Three is usually right; past five the project has not chosen.
What done looks like
neededHow anybody will know it worked. Numbers where you have them, and a date.
Boundaries
In scope
neededWhat this project will do.
Out of scope
neededWhat it will not do, including the things somebody will ask for in month three.
Assumptions
What has to stay true. Each one is a risk if it turns out not to be.
Constraints
What you cannot change: a date, a budget, a system, a regulation.
The plan
Deliverables
neededThe things that will exist at the end and can be handed over.
Milestones
neededThe few dates that matter, not the whole plan.
| Milestone | Date |
|---|
Budget
What has been approved, and by whom.
People
Sponsor
neededThe one person who can change the scope or stop it.
Project manager
neededThe one person who runs it day to day.
Stakeholders
Who is affected and what they care about.
| Name | Role | What they care about |
|---|
Risks
Risks
What could stop this, and what you will do about each one.
| Risk | Response |
|---|
0% written, across 15 sections.
What is missing
- Nothing written yet. Start at the top; the order is the order a reader needs it in.
Frequently asked questions
The questions people actually ask about this document.
- What is a project charter?
- One document that says why a project exists, what it will and will not do, who can decide things, and what finished looks like. It is written before the work starts and it is the thing you point at when somebody asks for something the project never agreed to do.
- How is it different from a project plan?
- The charter says what and why; the plan says how and when, in detail. A charter is one or two pages and changes rarely. A plan is a schedule and changes weekly. Almost every bad charter is bad the same way, by being a plan with a cover page: it lists forty tasks and never says what the project is for.
- How long should it be?
- One to two pages. If it is longer than that nobody reads it, and a charter nobody has read cannot settle an argument, which is its only real job. The sections here are deliberately short fields rather than a blank page for that reason.
- Why does out of scope matter so much?
- Because it is the only part that gets tested. Nobody argues about the purpose; they argue in month three about whether the second site was included. A scope with nothing outside it is a wish rather than a boundary, and the useful entries are the specific things somebody will plausibly ask for.
- Who should sign it?
- The sponsor, and they should be one named person rather than a committee. The test is whether they could stop the project on their own authority. If the answer is no, you have the wrong name in the box, and you will find that out at the worst possible moment.
- When should it be revisited?
- When something in it stops being true: the sponsor changes, a constraint moves, an assumption fails. Not on a schedule. A charter that gets a monthly update has become a status report, and the status report should be a different document.