The charter is the official document that creates a project and names the person who will manage it. Before this document is issued there may be an idea, a request for funding or an approved business case, but there is no project and no project manager. Nobody has the authority to spend money, assign people or take decisions for the work. The charter is where that authority comes from.
This is a short document, typically one or two pages long. It is signed by someone high enough in the organisation to commit its resources, but who is not part of the project team. This is why it carries weight, and the sections below describe how.
Three documents that are often mentioned together, separated here by who owns each one and by what each one is for. The business case argues that the money is worth spending. The charter records that the decision has been made and grants the authority to act on it. The plan describes how that authority will be used.
What the charter authorises
The charter authorises two things, and they are easy to confuse. First, the project itself is authorised. The organisation has decided that this work will be done and has committed resources to it, and the charter is the record of that decision. Second, the project manager is authorised. A named person may now use the organisation's resources for the work and take decisions about it, within limits that the charter sets.
Of the two, the second matters more from day to day, and it is also the one most often forgotten. In most organisations the people who work on a project report to somebody else. A project manager cannot instruct them through a reporting line, because there is none. Whatever authority the project manager has over the work comes from the charter and from the person who signed it. Without a charter, a project manager is asking for cooperation with nothing to point to.
Who issues the charter
Issuing the charter is the sponsor's job. The sponsor is the person, or sometimes the group, with the authority to fund the work and commit people to it, and that person is usually outside the project. A project manager cannot issue their own charter, because nobody can grant themselves an authority they do not already have.
Issuing and drafting are two different things. Very often the project manager writes the text, and that is good practice, since the person who will run the work is well placed to describe it. The draft becomes a charter when the sponsor signs it. It does not matter who typed the words.
What the charter contains
Purpose comes first. A charter explains why the project exists and what business need it is intended to address, so the rationale remains clear even after the people who made the original decision have moved on. Next come measurable objectives and clear criteria for success, defined early when they are still relatively easy to challenge or change. The rest of the charter builds around this core. Each element serves a practical purpose, since it prevents the confusion, disagreements or questions that tend to surface later when it is missing.
| Element | Why it is there |
|---|---|
| Purpose and business need | Keeps the reasoning available after the people who made the decision have gone |
| Measurable objectives and success criteria | Fixes what success looks like while it is still easy to challenge or change |
| High level requirements and product description | Says what is being built at a level a sponsor can agree to in one sitting |
| Boundaries and exclusions | Gives every later argument about creeping scope a written position to start from |
| Overall risk and the risks known now | Puts the exposure in front of the sponsor before the money is committed |
| Summary milestone schedule | Names the handful of dates the organisation is planning around, ahead of any detailed schedule |
| Summary budget | States the funding envelope that the detailed estimates will later have to fit inside |
| Approval requirements | Records who decides the project succeeded, which is a different question from who paid for it |
| Assumptions and constraints | Shows what the summary figures rest on, so a broken assumption can be traced |
| Named project manager and authority level | Makes one person able to use organisational resources, and says how far that goes |
| Named sponsor and signature | Identifies the authority that everything above it borrows from |
Everything in the table is deliberately kept at a high level. Milestones are a handful of dates, the budget is an envelope, and the requirements describe what the product is without specifying how it works. Detail comes later, in the plan, once planning has actually happened. Detail written into a charter before then is made up, and a charter full of made up detail has to be revised the moment real planning begins.
What happens to a project without a charter
Every project is challenged from the moment it starts. A department head wants their analyst back, a competing initiative claims the same budget, and a stakeholder insists that a deliverable was always part of the scope. Each of these is really a question about what was agreed and who agreed it.
Where a charter exists, the answer to that question is a document with a senior signature on it. Where no charter exists, the answer is one person's memory of a conversation, and a memory will usually lose to a more confident memory of a different conversation. The exclusions section earns its place here, because an argument about scope creep can begin from a written boundary rather than from two memories.
Projects that start without a charter tend to show the same problems, and nobody connects them to the missing document. Resources drift to other priorities, objectives shift quietly, and at the end nobody can say whether the project succeeded, because what success meant was never written down.
How the charter differs from the plan
The charter defines what the project is and confirms that it may go ahead. The project management plan defines how the project will be run. The plan comes later, is approved separately, and is changed through change control as more becomes known about the work.
Because the charter sits above the plan, it changes rarely, and only through the sponsor. When the purpose or the objectives genuinely change, the sponsor reissues it, and that reissue is a significant event for the organisation, because it means the reason for the project has changed. A charter that is quietly updated every month has stopped being an authorisation and has become a status report.