Project Charter

When starting a project, it gives comfort to know what the expectations are. This Project Charter template will help all Project Managers and Project Sponsors to align their expectations. We have built this template to serve you in the most intuitive way.

Which problem it helps to solve:

At project start it is often not 100% clear what the final result is supposed to look like. Also, one can find many cases when the view of the Project Manager and the expectations of the Project Sponsor differ. Such a delta brings the risk of misalignment and, in a result, the Project Manager being rated poorly by the Project Sponsor at the end of the project.

In our Project Charter template we list the typical aspects which should be clarified at project start:

• Purpose and Scope of the project
• Project Organisation
• Key Milestones (what & when)
• Financials
• Top 5 risks
• Assumptions

Documenting these aspects early on will substantially lower the risk of misalignment.

How it works:

Soon after a project has been initiated the team will meet for project initiation meetings. Here, the teams typically break down the overall objectives into a scope and assign dates to the key milestones. The financial parameters display the budget needs but also the financial contribution generated by the project.

We decided to offer dedicated sections for Top 5 risks and assumptions because we have experienced how often the source of project deviations are risks which become problems down the road. Assumptions usually are equivalent to a level of uncertainty when narrowing down scope, timing and the financials.

It is our recommendation to use the Project Charter in the early phase of a project as a living document. Capturing the agreements made in this one document simplifies agreeing with the Project Sponsor.

What else to know:

In most cases a Project Charter is not a static document. Instead, it requires revisions whenever significant aspects have to be changed (e.g. scope changes).

We recommend to align each revision of the Project Charter between Project Manager and Project Sponsor.