Project Charter – It’s there, but hidden

Every project will have a Charter; we just recognise it with different names. This is the basis of any project in my opinion. It details, amongst others:

• business case,
• project objectives and scope,
• high level requirements in terms of product, budget and schedule,
• list of stakeholders,
• potential risks,
• ROI, etc.

In real life project management, these information are scattered across the project network, some written down, some in emails, some in someone's head. The challenge is to put all this on paper and get everyone to be aware of it (and agree). From PMI perspective, one more important content of the Project Charter, is the recognition of the Project Manager. This document, gives the authority to the assigned project manager to manage the said project.

Throughout the project phase, Project Charter must be the main reference document to ensure that projects are delivered as per required by the customer and/or sponsor. The rest of the project documents are supporting documents for Project Charter; they detailed out what has been stated in the Charter. And Project Management Plan is the main document that compiles the rest of the project plans and project documents.

Ideally this piece of document which contains the high level information about the intended project should be the Holy Grail for all project managers. This is true when we want to control scope creeps, and change requests.

The creation of Project Charter is done very early in the project. It is during the Project Initialization and within the Project Integration Management. Every project manager must ensure that a project charter is in place before any project work starts.