Project Charter Generator

What a project charter actually does

Most templates treat a charter as a summary of the project. The Project Management Institute (PMI), which publishes A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (the PMBOK Guide), treats it as something stronger: permission¹. Its third edition (2004) defined a project charter as "a document issued by the project initiator or sponsor that formally authorizes the existence of a project, and provides the project manager with the authority to apply organizational resources to project activities"².

The key word is authority. A charter answers three questions, as Alex Brown put it in a paper for PMI's 2005 Global Congress²:

• Does the sponsor know the project exists, and agree that it should?
• Does the sponsor know who is leading it, and back that person?
• Has the sponsor given that person the right to spend money and people's time on it?

Brown also points out that the PMBOK Guide does not require a set format². A charter can be a one-page memo or an email. What matters is that the person who owns the budget has said yes, in writing, to a specific purpose, scope and leader. A polished document that no sponsor has signed off on is not a charter. It is a proposal.

Scope: write down what is out, not just what is in

Vague scope is the most common way a charter fails. In PMI's Pulse of the Profession survey of 5,402 professionals (2018), respondents said 52% of their projects completed in the prior 12 months had scope creep, meaning work was added without adding time, money or people. That was up from 43% five years earlier³. These are self-reported figures, but the pattern is familiar to anyone who has run a project.

Scope creep rarely starts as a big request. It starts with a line like "improve the support experience," which can later be read to include almost anything. The fix is to name the edges on both sides.

A vague charter and a stronger one

This is the help-desk example shown above, rewritten. The company, team and numbers are invented for illustration.

The "out" list does the most work. When someone asks in week four whether chat is included, the answer is already written down, and adding it becomes a conscious choice with a cost, not a quiet favor.

Name one sponsor, by name

"Leadership" is not a sponsor. A sponsor is one person with the budget and the standing to clear roadblocks, settle disputes about scope, and say no. In the same PMI survey (2018), 26% of organizations said inadequate sponsor support was the primary cause of their failed projects. Organizations with actively engaged sponsors on more than 80% of their projects reported 40% more successful projects than those with sponsors on fewer than half³.

This generator drafts the purpose, objectives, scope, deliverables, milestones and risks. It does not know who your sponsor is, so add that line yourself, along with the project lead. Then get the sponsor to confirm the charter in writing. If no one will put their name to it, the project is not yet authorized, whatever the document says.

Success measures that mean something

Many articles on project charters open with a claim from the Standish Group's CHAOS reports that most projects fail. Treat those figures with care. The reports counted a project as a success only if it finished on time, on budget and with every feature first specified⁴. J. Laurenz Eveleens and Chris Verhoef tested those definitions against 5,457 forecasts from 1,211 real projects and concluded, in IEEE Software (2010), that they are misleading, one-sided and produce "meaningless figures"⁴. A project that beats its estimate by a wide margin is not counted as a problem, and an organization that pads its estimates looks more successful. Robert Glass raised similar doubts in Communications of the ACM in 2006⁵.

The lesson for a charter is not that projects rarely fail. It is that "on time and on budget" is a weak definition of success. Roger Atkinson argued in the International Journal of Project Management (1999) that cost and time are "best guesses" and that it is time to accept other success criteria⁶. A better charter names:

• The outcome, with a baseline. "First-response time from 6 hours to under 1" can be checked. "Better support" cannot.
• When and how it will be measured. Say who pulls the number and over what period.
• The limits. State the budget and the date as constraints the sponsor has agreed to, separately from the outcome.

What a charter does not answer, and what to use next

A charter says why, what and who is in charge. It is not a plan. Once it is signed, it leaves open:

• Who does each piece of work. A RACI matrix sets who is responsible, who approves, and who needs to be kept informed.
• What could go wrong, in detail. The charter lists the main risks. A risk register gives each one an owner, a likelihood and a response.
• Who needs to be brought along. A stakeholder map shows whose support or resistance will shape the project.
• Whether the objectives are specific enough. Run them through the SMART goals generator before the sponsor signs.

Keep the charter short and go back to it. When a change request arrives, check it against the scope and the success measures. If it does not fit, it needs the sponsor's approval and a new date or budget, written into a revised charter.