Before starting a project is important to clarify some basic rules, goals and definitions for the upcoming project before it gets started and approved by the initiator of the project. That is where the project charter comes into play.
So, the project charter itself is a document which should mainly consists of the following parts:
What is the essence of the project?
What are the goals and objectives of the project?
How are you planning to reach and achieve these goals and objectives?
What are non-goals and non-objectives of the project? Also point out relationships or even prerequisites to other project and tasks.
Provide a shared understanding of the project.
The charter should communicate its value and/or reason for existence to every person who has a part in it, from the team to the project manager, stakeholders and initiator of the project etc.
Act as a contract between the project sponsor, key stakeholders and the project team.
By noting the responsibilities of each party involved in the project, everyone is clear what they’re duties are.
To put it in a nutshell, the project charter is one of the first important tasks within starting a project. A charter which is not clearly defined, can lead to misunderstanding and false assumptions and can in the end lead to a more expensive, even failed project.
Creating a project charter
Normally there are a lot of templates available, which you can use to create a charter on your own. Since in Austria the IPMA (=International Project Management Organization) is the commonly used standard, the following structure for instance can be used to create such a project charter very easily:
Besides the previously mentioned goals and team members and description of the project, also the categorization of the project is a very important chapter within the project charter. This categorization (or prioritization) points out some key factors of the upcoming project like:
Strategic impact, risk factor, complexity
Novelty of the product, clear goals and‚ requirements
Time pressure
With all this information together, every team member including the project leader as well, can refer on this initial charter, which can act as a common project vision. Therefore, the chatter helps to identify things that probably will go wrong or not as planed as in the beginning and let the project leader try to identify measures for that.
Sources:
https://www.projectmanager.com/blog/project-charter (15.04.2018)
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