The What, Why and How of Project Charters
Mike Griffiths is a consultant and trainer who help organizations improve performance through shared leadership, agility and (un)common sense. He maintains the blog LeadingAnswers.com.
Creating a great project charter is an art and a science. Anyone new to the profession of project management needs to learn how to create a project charter. It is not only an important early project deliverable, it also sets the tone and lays out the foundation for the rest of the project.
While we can spend our careers improving our ability to craft effective project charters, we can get to a 70% good-enough state by addressing some basic topics. This article explains those basics.
Context is Crucial
First, it is critical to understand that context matters. The definition of what makes an acceptable—or great—project charter will vary from organization to organization. It will also be driven by factors such as project size, criticality, type, approach, etc.
The project charter for kicking off a safety-critical public works project will be very different than a charter for a small internal project to, say, build a tool to recover disk space used by duplicate files.
Large, critical projects will require large comprehensive charters. These can take teams of experts weeks or months to create. Small projects will likely have their three- to eight-page charter written in a day or two by the project manager. When creating (or reviewing) project charters, we need to understand this context. Ask, what is appropriate? What level of rigor and detail does this …
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Published at Tue, 29 Jan 2019 05:00:00 +0000
