Last Updated: January 9, 2024
Initiate Project Charter Workflow
The workflow will guide you through the following critical sections of the Project Charter:
Title the Project and Write the Description: You will learn the art of crafting a resonant project title and an accompanying description that captures the essence and breadth of the project, tailored to engage and inform a diverse audience.
Summarize Stakeholders, Objectives, Constraints, and Risks: This section will delve into methods for summarizing key project details—identifying stakeholders, defining SMART+A objectives, outlining constraints, and assessing risks—ensuring all potential influences on the project's trajectory are acknowledged and strategized.
Summarize Communication, Compliance, and Performance Plans: Essential to project governance, this part of the charter details how to formulate communication plans, comply with relevant standards, and outline performance metrics, setting the stage for how the project will report progress, adapt to changes, and define successful completion.
Present Project Team: Here, you will understand the importance of detailing the project team structure, clarifying roles and responsibilities, and ensuring a balance of workloads, thus setting a collaborative and accountable project culture from the outset.
Obtain Approval: The chapter culminates with obtaining formal approval for the Project Charter. This step crystallizes stakeholder commitment and serves as a green light for the project to move from planning to execution.
Project Charter
Throughout the workflow, you will encounter a blend of strategic advice and practical tools designed to streamline the creation of a Project Charter. By its conclusion, you will be equipped to draft a charter that reduces ambiguity, aligns stakeholder expectations, and becomes a living document that guides decision-making throughout the project lifecycle.
For the most part, completing a project charter is a function of filling in the blanks with the content you have already created as you plan a project by following a process like Project MAP, like the one presented in this MS Project Master Class.
As you complete each Activity (chapter) in this MS Project Master Class, summaries of your content should be placed in your Project Charter.
Before your project is deployed, the Project Charter is completed and approved. The Charter becomes the primary reference and communication tool for the project. The Project Charter is a summary of all of the elements listed in the figure above.