Tag Archives: Visual Project Charter™

What is in a Project Charter?

What is in a Project Charter?

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

A project charter is an essential document used to define a project and ensure that all stakeholders are on the same page. It outlines the project’s purpose, goals, timelines, resources, and responsibilities, and serves as the foundation for successful project execution.

The most important element of a project charter is the scope. This section defines the scope of the project in terms of what will be done, the objectives to be achieved, and the deliverables expected. It also identifies any constraints or limitations that may affect the project.

The project charter also outlines the timeline and milestones for the project. This section lays out the start and end dates, as well as any major milestones, such as the completion of certain tasks or the delivery of specific deliverables.

The project charter also includes the roles and responsibilities of the stakeholders. This section outlines who is responsible for what, and who has authority over which decisions. It also defines the communication process between the stakeholders and outlines the decision-making process.

The resources section of the project charter lists the resources required to complete the project, such as personnel, materials, and equipment. It also outlines the budget for the project, including any costs associated with the resources.

Finally, the project charter includes the risks and assumptions associated with the project. This section identifies potential risks, such as changes in scope, resource constraints, or political changes, and outlines how they will be addressed. It also outlines any assumptions made during the project planning process.

A project charter is an important document that helps ensure that all stakeholders are on the same page and that the project is properly defined and managed. It outlines the scope, timeline, roles and responsibilities, resources, and risks and assumptions associated with the project, and serves as the foundation for successful project execution.

SPECIAL BONUS: You can get your very own copy of the Visual Project Charter™ for FREE for use as 35″x56″ giant poster or as a background to use in Miro, Mural, Lucidspark, Microsoft Whiteboard, Google Jamboard, etc. The Visual Project Charter™ was
created by Braden Kelley to help project managers set up their projects for greater success by beginning their project management efforts in a more visual, collaborative way.

The Visual Project Charter™ helps organizations:

  • Move beyond the Microsoft Word document
  • Make the creation of Project Charters more fun!
  • Kickoff projects in a more collaborative, more visual way
  • Structure dialogue to capture the project overview, project scope, project conditions and project approach

Image credit: Unsplash

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Charting Change Book Launch Special – Free Visual Project Charter™ Poster Download

Charting Change Number One New ReleaseIn celebration of the launch of Braden Kelley’s latest book – Charting Change – we are proud to make two new poster size downloads from the Change Planning Toolkit™ available for a limited time for FREE:

  1. Visual Project Charter™ – 35″x56″ scalable PDF download
  2. ACMP Standard for Change Management® (Visualization) – 35″x56″ scalable PDF download

11″x17″ scalable PDF downloads of these two tools will remain as free downloads from the Change Planning Toolkit™ here on the site. BUT, these 35″x56″ poster size versions are only available as free downloads for a LIMITED TIME here on the site. If you run marketing for a consulting firm or a software company targeting change management or project management professionals, I am looking for sponsors to help keep them free.

Contact me to sponsor one or both.

The Visual Project Charter™ helps organizations:

  • Move beyond the Microsoft Word document
  • Make the creation of Project Charters more fun!
  • Kickoff projects in a more collaborative, more visual way
  • Structure dialogue to capture the project overview, project scope, project conditions and project approach

Use it in planning your projects in a more visual and collaborative way for greater alignment, accountability, and more successful outcomes.

Visual Project Charter™

One good place to get it printed at the 35″x56″ size to put up on your wall for your cross-fuctional project charter collaborative meeting is PosterPrintHouse.com for about $50.00 plus or minus depending on any specials they might be running.

The ACMP Standard for Change Management®:

  • Outlines generally accepted practices, processes, tasks and activities used by change management practitioners across multiple roles, organizations and industries.
  • Provides a clear and consistent vocabulary of essential change management terminology and offers guidance for organizational change mgmt. for any type of change.
  • Supports organization decision making regarding change management resources.

ACMP Standard Visualization

So grab these 35″x56″ poster size free downloads while you can, and get yourself a copy of Braden Kelley’s books:

Keep innovating and making positive change!

Accelerate your change and transformation success

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Visualizing Project Planning Success

Visualizing Project Planning Success for 2016

The first three of ten free downloads from the Change Planning Toolkit™ were focused on innovation and change:

  1. Five Keys to Successful Change
  2. Architecting the Organization for Change
  3. Building a Global Sensing Network

The goal of these three frameworks was to get people visualizing more holistically how to build a strong foundation for a successful continuous change capability for the organization and a strong, vibrant innovation ecosystem. The next free download will tackle one of many project managers’ least favorite project planning activities – the creation of a project charter.

The Visual Project Charter™

The truth is that for most of us project managers, whether we want to admit it or not, the process of creating a project charter is one that we often dread. We sit there in front of a Microsoft Word template like the one in figure 1 blinking at us on the screen and realize just how much missing or incomplete information we have when we begin typing into the one of the very first, and potentially most important, project artifacts for any project. We know we face the sending of a series of emails, follow up emails, follow up to the follow up emails, and maybe even some escalation emails and phone calls just to get the information we need to create the first draft of a project charter. And that’s before we even begin trying to get alignment, buy-in, and sign-off on the document.

Project Charter Template

Figure 1

It doesn’t have to be this way!

Because every project ultimately changes something, as part of the Change Planning Toolkit™ I have designed a Visual Project Charter™ (see figure 2) to help project managers make the project planning process and the creation of the project charter a more visual, more collaborative, and more enjoyable process, providing an opportunity to improve the chances of project success by creating upfront improvements in a AAA project experience:

  1. Alignment
  2. Accountability
  3. Action

The Visual Project Charter™ helps organizations:

  • Move beyond the Microsoft Word document
  • Make the creation of Project Charters more fun!
  • Kickoff projects in a more collaborative, more visual way
  • Structure dialogue to capture the project overview, project scope, project conditions and project approach

Visual Project Charter

Figure 2

Get your sticky notes and pens ready and gather the people with the knowledge and information necessary to accurately shape the project!

The Visual Project Charter™ is designed to be used in place of, or in advance of populating your normal Project Charter template in Microsoft Word. It MUST be used in a cross-functional project team meeting before project kickoff to initiate the conversations necessary to surface the assumptions, issues, risks, constraints, and definitions of success. As you know, identifying the potential land mines before you even begin a project will both increase the chances of success and decrease the chances of schedule or cost overruns.

The canvas helps you ask, visualize and collaborate on some of the following questions:

  • What is the purpose of this project?
  • What is the key information to include in the Project Overview?
  • What is the Project Scope?
  • What are the Project Conditions we must consider?
  • What Project Approach are we going to use?

The goal is to capture all of your typical project charter information:

  1. Purpose of the Project
  2. Project Overview
    • Executive Summary
    • Business Needs
    • Business Justification
  3. Project Scope
    • Stakeholders
    • Objectives, Goals and Success Criteria
    • Deliverables
    • Deliverables Out of Scope
    • Estimated Budget and Costs
    • Organizational Impacts
    • Departmental SOW
    • Estimated Duration
  4. Project Conditions
    • Assumptions
    • Issues
    • Risks
    • Constraints
  5. Project Approach
    • Structure
    • Project Team Roles and Responsibilities

This is a lot more FUN and SUCCESSFUL approach to building a project charter. Most project managers who see benefit in this approach will probably choose to use the Visual Project Charter™ as a tool to gather the inputs necessary to populate the traditional project charter template on ProjectManagement.com or one that you’ve created yourself.

But, the advantage of potentially of using the Visual Project Charter™ in place of a traditional project charter document is that you can make large format prints of your drafts and post them in the halls of the involved workgroups for additional comments before creating a final draft that can then be signed off on by the project sponsor and other key accountable parties for all the world to see and to help drive a AAA project experience by maintaining:

  1. Alignment
  2. Accountability
  3. Action

I’m making a free download of the Visual Project Charter™ available to the readers of this article and purchasers of my new book Charting Change (Feb 2016) as an 11”x17” format PDF. A larger format (poster size – 35″x56″) version will be made available to individual licensees and site licensees of the Change Planning Toolkit™ (coming soon) or can be purchased separately at a nominal fee here (UPDATE: You can now access the poster size version for free too):

Click here to access the poster size version (35″x56″) of the Visual Project Charter™

Remote Project Management

UPDATE (October 9, 2021): A few months ago I created a video example of how to use the Visual Project Charter™ that you’ll see below in part to show how you can not only print the Visual Project Charter™ as a 35″x56″ poster BUT you can also use it a background in online whiteboarding tools like Miro, Mural, LucidSpark, and Microsoft Whiteboard and then have people place their virtual sticky notes on top of it.

So, what do you think?

Is the Visual Project Charter™ a potentially useful additional tool for your project planning process?

Do you plan on trying it?

Or do you perhaps already use something similar?

Is there anything conspicuously absent that threatens its effectiveness as an additional project planning tool?

Sign up to get the Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly newsletter in your inbox

Click to access this framework as a scalable 11″x17″ PDF download

Click here to access the poster size version (35″x56″) of the Visual Project Charter™

Accelerate your change and transformation success

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.