Top-notch Project Charter - What you Need to Know
Adriana Girdler, CET, PMP
Helping project managers and accidental PMs successfully achieve project goals with an efficient, practical, non-chaotic system | Award-winning Project Manager | Workout & Guitar Enthusiast
How to Write a Project Charter
Are you creating a project charter and need to know all the key elements to include? A project charter is a critical document in project management and if you’re leading projects, you need to know everything to include on your project charter so that you can set your project up for success.
Why you need a project charter
You may have heard the saying before that “failing to plan is planning to fail.” This could not be truer, and this is where a project charter comes in. When you create a project charter, you’re laying out what the project is all about so that everyone on your project (sponsors, team members, stakeholders) are on the same page.
A project charter is your go-to document throughout the project. When people start challenging you, you can direct them to the project charter to remind them of the agreements that were previously made at the beginning of the project.
For these reasons, every project MUST have a charter... It’s simply a non-negotiable!
Look at existing information
The first thing you’ll need to do when creating your project charter is to look at existing information. Hopefully, at the beginning of the project, you got some basic, important information about the project that you can then dump into your charter.
Examples of existing information that you’ll want in your charter include:
· Project justification and background information
· Project scope statement
· Project deliverables and assumptions
· Project sponsor
· Steering committee
· Project timing
· Priority matrix
Then, you’ll want to move on to collecting the information you still need for your project charter.
What’s next?
I really want you to understand, in detail, what goes into a project charter so that you can create a top-notch one. So, I’ve created a video that explains all the elements you need in your project charter in detail. I’ll also explain the information you still need to find so that you can be crystal clear on how to create a project charter that will lead your project to success.
So, meet me over on YouTube to learn the rest of the project charter essentials! Just Google 'Adriana Girdler YouTube' to find my channel.