The Project Charter: Foundation for Success

The project charter is underrated, often seen an extra task rather than the essential tool that it is. The charter has always been recommended as a best practice, but it seems it has recently fallen out of favor. Here at Craze, Monroe & Associates, we believe the project charter is the first building block needed to establish a foundation for success.

The charter is not paperwork, it’s the document that guides your initiating and planning activities for every project. Our principal, Kimberley Monroe, learned this over twenty years ago and it still stands the test of time. As a young analyst on an enterprise IT team, she was new to managing projects. Her supervisor, a certified project management professional (PMP), insisted that every project have a charter, and, as you might guess, there was resistance. Kimberley, soon learned that having a completed project charter was the equivalent of having a handy project overview document allowing her to readily answer any stakeholder’s question about scope, milestones, budget, and more without searching through endless emails or trying to respond from memory. And that is why it’s still one for the top five recommendations she has for aspiring and practicing project managers today, and why we provide a free project charter template.

Where charters actually fail

A project charter does two things: it authorizes the project, and it gives the project manager authority to direct resources toward it. Everything else in the document exists to ensure everyone has a baseline understanding of the project.

That’s the part organizations and project leaders miss. They treat the charter as optional or as a box to check before the “real work” starts. Then one month in, without a charter, no one is aligned about the purpose, scope, or value of the project and people are wondering why they should commit time, staff, and other resources to yet another poorly initiated project.

The charter is the document that says, “This is a formal initiative, critical to our organization’s strategic goals, and we are committed to managing it as such.” Unfortunately, when the charter is skipped, we force stakeholders to subjectively determine whether the effort is truly worth their time which allows for misalignment before the project has truly begun.

So, where, beyond the absence of a charter, can a charter actually fail? We’ve listed five of the most common failure points below.

1. No stated out-of-scope. Most charters document what a project will deliver. Few document what it won’t. That omission is where scope creep gets its opening. A stakeholder assumes something was included because nobody indicated that it wasn’t.

2. Vague success criteria. “Improve efficiency” is not a criterion. It’s a hope. If a standard can’t be pointed to and confirmed as met or not met, it isn’t measurable, and it won’t hold up when someone disputes whether the project delivered.

3. Assumptions nobody tests or revisits. Every charter runs on assumptions: staffing will be available, a system will be ready, a vendor will perform. Assumptions are fine. Assumptions nobody tracks or tests are risks wearing a disguise.

4. A budget nobody actually approved. A dollar figure in a charter means little without a named approver and an approval date next to it. Without that, “the budget” is just a number someone wrote down.

5. Signatures that never happen. A charter sitting in a shared drive, unsigned, isn’t authorization. It’s a draft. If a sponsor never formally signs off, the project manager’s authority to direct resources was never actually granted; it was assumed.

Individually, each gap looks small. Together, they create ambiguities you don’t need.

What a valid charter actually contains

A charter strong enough to support the project typically includes the following information regardless of industry: the business case for why the project exists, what’s in scope and explicitly what isn’t, primary stakeholders who can affect or be affected by the work, a summary-level budget, the deliverables that define done, a milestone-level schedule, the assumptions and constraints the plan depends on, a preliminary view of the risks and issues already in play, and success criteria specific enough to test.

The charter shouldn’t be exhaustive, but it should be complete, and that’s why we designed a simple template that can be adapted to any project.

A template, built to be used

We built a project charter template that follows a structure grounded in the core components recognized across PMBOK® Guide editions, translated into a format sponsors will actually read.

It’s built to be completed once, signed, and referenced throughout your project initiation and planning activities or as often as needed.

Get the template

Download the free CMA Project Charter Template and put a working charter in front of your next sponsor before the project starts, not after confusion ensues.

CMA’s PMP®- and CCM-certified principals can also facilitate project initiation planning directly by working with your team to pressure-test scope, assumptions, and success criteria, and put governance in place before resources are committed.

Schedule a free consultation at crazemonroe.com or call 713-882-7331.

Craze, Monroe & Associates | Client-First. Certified. Accountable. | crazemonroe.com | 713-882-7331