Note
A fellow consultant once facilitated a project chartering workshop for one of her clients. Prior to the workshop, senior management had identified not one but two executive-level project sponsors. During the workshop, it became clear that these sponsors had very different ideas about the project. They could not agree on the project’s overall objectives, goals, or strategic approach. A project that begins moving in two directions at once is doomed to failure. To their credit, this organization halted the project until they could resolve this conflict. Chartering is the time to bring the project into focus and align the stakeholders toward common goals.
Following a preliminary needs analysis or feasibility study, someone decides that a project should be launched to address these needs. This "someone" often is a member of senior management who serves as the project sponsor. The next step is to create a project charter, which is the principal deliverable from project initiation.
In the passion of enthusiasm surrounding a new project, it can be difficult to persuade people to take the time to write a charter. Nonetheless, the time spent thinking carefully about what the project is—and is not—and defining project objectives is time well spent. The task of writing a charter could fall to the project sponsor. Alternatively, if a project manager has already been tentatively assigned, he should lead the chartering effort.
The charter serves as a guiding document for the project. It identifies the key project drivers and establishes the business, organizational, and technical context for the project. The charter lays the groundwork for informed decisions and planning regarding the project’s direction, outcomes, and execution.
Different organizations use various names for this sort of high-level document. It might be called a project initiation document, vision and scope document, marketing (or market) requirements document, business case, project datasheet, or statement of work. These various documents likely will have somewhat different contents. However, they all communicate to team members and other stakeholders a common understanding of why the project is important, what it will deliver, and how it fits in the organization. Make the charter available to all project stakeholders, except those who shouldn’t see any proprietary information in the charter.
The most significant outcome of project initiation is not the charter document itself, but rather the insights that are gained and the agreements that are reached during the chartering process. The charter is simply a container for some important project information. Chartering is the first opportunity for the project sponsor, key stakeholders, and prospective team members to collaborate on shaping the project’s vision, intention, and direction. The chartering process serves as a mechanism for the people who have the funds to reach an agreement with the people who will spend those funds to execute the project (III 2001). Chartering might reveal disconnects between the vision and scope that different parties hold for the project. Now is the time to resolve those disconnects and reach a shared perspective.
A common approach is for the business owners to begin by creating the business case for the project or product. From that document, the project sponsor or project manager derives the initial scope of activity described in the charter. The charter is expanded as additional information is obtained. The charter ultimately becomes the key point of reference for stakeholders as the project progresses and wraps up.
The charter contains information that must be kept current and relevant throughout the project. Early in the project, only some of the stakeholders are identified, customer needs are understood just at a high level, and many project details have yet to be discovered. Therefore, it’s important to update the charter during the course of the project as vital information becomes known and course adjustments, such as scope changes, are needed. Course adjustments typically require that some commitments be renegotiated. (See Chapter 9, for more about negotiating commitments.) If you are following good change control practices and retaining earlier versions of the charter, the charter becomes a valuable historical record that can refresh memories long after the heady days of project initiation.
A small project in which all stakeholders are in the same location and already interact frequently can get away with a simple charter. A larger or more complex project, particularly one that involves multiple organizations, demands a more robust charter. The project participants can refer to the charter periodically to keep their efforts aligned. In some cases, a formal contract will serve as the project charter. Projects should adapt their chartering process and the complexity of their charter to suit the project’s nature, size, and risk level. If some information in the project charter template described in this chapter is not relevant or fails to improve shared understanding for the project, feel free to remove it.
The project charter also serves as a resource for helping project participants make critical decisions during the course of the project. Whenever the project takes an unexpected turn, the project manager must determine how to respond. The objectives and priorities established in the charter provide guidance for how to make the right choice. Such decisions include:
Proposed scope modifications
Constraint changes
Trade-offs between features, quality, schedule, staff, and cost (see Chapter 4)
Resolving conflicting objectives between stakeholders