How do you invest limited time and resources into the right projects? And how do you frame a project to focus on the right priorities? When only two-thirds of projects succeed within budget, you need a way to answer these questions and set yourself up for success. Writing a project charter is a great place to start.
Project charters are documents written at the beginning of a project, outlining the project’s goals and tying your initiative into wider business strategies. By learning how to write a project charter, you can align each member of your team to deliver ground-breaking projects.
A project charter is a short document explaining a project and its goals. Consider it an overview for stakeholders and teams involved in a project. By describing a project’s core elements and goals, your charter sets a foundation on which you can build your plan.
Project charters help align stakeholders, managers, and teams before starting a project. Your charter helps gauge whether a project is achievable, fits with company goals, and meets resource requirements. Specifically, project charters can help with:
A project charter is overarching, while project plans focus more on a project's minutiae and step-by-step processes. Project plans emphasize milestones, timelines, and metrics for success. If project charters outline an initiative’s vision, project plans explain how you'll execute them. A project charter often informs a project plan.
Other similar documents include:
A project charter should describe your overall objectives and how you plan to meet them. Treat the process like taking an inventory where you compile all the details about your project. Here are eight steps to get you started.
1. Outline basic project information
Begin your charter by giving readers the big picture. The charter should note basic information about the project, your teams, and the people involved. Specifically, you want to include the names of the managers and stakeholders overseeing your project. Adding a last revision date also gives context when teams see changes in the document.
2. Identify goals and objectives
Charters explain your project's goals and objectives and why they're important. You can think of goals as broad, long-term aims, and objectives as measurable, short-term steps on the way to your goal. If you can explain how objectives feed into your goals, stakeholders can better understand how your project will proceed.
3. Clarify your deliverables
Describe the product or service that will come from your project. Deliverables can range in scope, from small UI changes to launching a new product. When outlining your deliverables, explain how the user will interact with them and the factors you considered as you scoped your deliverables. If possible, include metrics highlighting your deliverable’s quality.
4. Consider project scope and risks
A project’s scope defines the rigid boundaries around your project that enable you to hone in on specific goals. Stakeholders can help your team members clarify their goals and better understand the intended deliverable.
You also want to note potential risks in a project charter. So, if a website redesign runs the risk of going over budget, include that in the charter. This way, stakeholders can weigh the potential risks against the benefits. If you decide to move forward, write up contingency plans to help mitigate these risks.
5. Assign team roles and responsibilities
Project charters list the team members who will work on the new initiative. At a minimum, the charter should outline participants' names and job titles. You should also lay out the teams responsible for each part of the project, the tasks each member will complete, and the project manager they can turn to for support.
6. Set a budget and timeline
When setting the budget, consider where you’ll draw funds for the project and the resources needed to complete it.
Similar to the budget, your project timeline includes multiple dates for milestones and reviews. While you can simply note an end date for small projects, larger ones should include milestones with check-ins along the way. Explain what you'll achieve at every project stage so stakeholders can measure your progress.
7. Align with key stakeholders
Before wrapping up the charter, ensure it aligns with stakeholder expectations. One of your top priorities is convincing stakeholders the project will return on its investment. You can do that by pointing out project assumptions and writing success criteria.
Project assumptions consist of details you believe are true in the planning phase. While they won’t all hold up, they provide a baseline on which you can build your charter. Your success criteria define the standards you’ll use to measure a project's outcome and the value it brings. Aligning assumptions and success criteria helps establish clear project parameters with stakeholders.
8. Kick off your project
Once you align on success criteria, it’s time to dive in. Schedule a project kickoff meeting with your team to review goals and responsibilities and ensure everyone is on the same page. You can also share resources and schedule project check-ins related to milestones.
To help your team stay organized at the beginning of a project, use the Figma project kickoff template.
Want to make a charter with visual flair? Get started with FigJam's free template today.
Creating a first project charter often requires time and practice to get it right. Here are some best practices for writing your charter document to speed up the process.
When writing a project charter, ask yourself "who," "what," and "why" questions. While your project exists on paper, think through your deliverable's eventual value. You can get to the heart of why your project matters by asking:
Answering these core questions helps you anchor the project and explain its importance to stakeholders.
Visualizing your project can help persuade stakeholders. While you need to lay out the finer points in detail, design elements and images can illustrate those points. Include diagrams and flowcharts to help visualize milestones or break down complex workflows.
Writing a project charter should always involve collaboration. Your stakeholders, managers, and teams all bring unique insight to the table. Combining their perspectives can help develop a shared vision of the project. Breaking down these silos early also enables smoother cooperation between teams later in the project.
Charters need to explain a project’s value in clear terms . You can communicate a project's importance by keeping the document:
Before you can start a project, you need to align internal teams with stakeholders and set a realistic budget and timeline. By writing a project charter, you can empower your team to do their best work by setting clear, attainable goals.
To get ahead on your next project, try Figma’s project charter template. With FigJam, you and your team can collaborate on a shared online whiteboard to exchange feedback, design solutions, and track progress.
Once you've created your project charter, explore our collection of strategic planning templates to help you and your team drive your project to completion.
