Early in the preparing stage of a project, the management, the project manager, the core team members, and important stakeholders should draft up a project charter.
Drafting the project charter is an important step in defining the project. The process of drafting the project charter itself is an excellent way to check the logical relationship between the project and the whole business.
What is a Project Charter?
In project management, a project charter, project definition, or project statement is a statement of the scope, objectives, and participants in a project. It provides a preliminary delineation of roles and responsibilities, outlines the project's key goals, identifies the main stakeholders, and defines the authority of the project manager.
A project charter typically documents most of the following:
Reasons for undertaking the project
Objectives and constraints of the project, including in-scope and out-of-scope items
Identities of the main stakeholders
Risks and issues (a risk management plan should be part of the overall project management plan)
Benefits of the project
High-level budget and spending authority
Who should use the project charter?
Except for the project manager, the management, or the project sponsor should also understand the importance of having a project charter.
It helps to ensure the understanding of the project is not in conflict among the project sponsor and the team.
Moreover, the project charter could also act as a contract between the project sponsor, key stakeholders and the project team, detailing responsibilities.
How to use the project charter?
A project charter should be a living document, which means it could be changed flexibly during the execution of the project, although it should be completed before the start of the project.
The items in a standard project charter have a very tight logically relationship. Every item in the project charter should be co-related, actually, it must be co-related.
The project deliverable should be able to make the project goal accomplished. The scope and exclusion should be able to tell why setting these deliverables and why not. The benefit and cost should tell why the project or the goal is beneficial to the business, and how much the cost is.
The drafting process of the project charter is already a great way to check the relationship between them, which could avoid unnecessary work or even harmful work.
When to use a project charter?
The project charter should be started to be drafted as early as possible. It could facilitate the discussion in the earliest stage and could help check if the project could really help the business, or if it is able to run.
The project charter should also be a living document, the team and the project sponsor should constantly check if the project charter still fits the current situation. The project charter should change according to needs.
The project charter should also be well stored after the project is done, as it serves as an excellent experience record for projects in the future.
Any tips about using a project charter?
The drafting of the project charter would take very considerable time but it is worthed.
While drafting it, you would discover many issues that you might not realise before, and your project sponsor as well. It is usually wiser to spend the time on this, rather than being trapped in the issues generated while the project is already running.
A full project charter might also seem too long for mini-projects, but usually, it is still worth to keep maintaining it, although it can be amended according to the needs.
And due to the logical relationship in the items of the project charter, it is also a good tool for the project manager to provide air cover for the team, to ensure the task arrangement with the team is reasonable.
Is there anything need to be cautious about using the project charter?
Although a project charter should be completed before the project is started, sometimes the team could not reach an agreement on some items, especially the scope. In this situation, the project manager could record the disagreement for the project charter for an instant, and see if it could be changed while the project is running.
Moreover, in order to have easier and clear access to the project files, the project charter could also work as a portal, and other files could be put in the appendix of the project charter. However, since there are a lot of digital project management tools that could do better than this, the project manager could decide according to the tools he/she has.
A project charter is an important foundation of a successful project. Although it might look simple and a bit bureaucratic, it could avoid a lot of problems that could arise while the project is running.
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