What is a Project Charter
Typically in an IT services environment especially when you are working in a CMM level 5 organization you hear of this term a project Charter and the first time I heard of it when I was with Tata Interactive Systems ( http://www.tatainterative.com)
A project charter is the single most important document in project initiation, it captures almost all the elements of a project which the manager can either fall back upon or submit reports when asked. The idea of this document is to capture key objectives which every project satisfied.
In a projected environment the bottom line of the company depends on the individual profitability of each and every project and every project has some key objectives to satisfy. The project has to satisfy a certain quality objective, a certain schedule objective, it has an objective for the HR dept etc and these are set at the beginning of the project by the project manager using the project charter as a tool. .
So the project charter captures:
- The name of the project
- Why is this project important to the organization
- What kind of product are we making
- What are the critical success factors for this project
- What is the dollar rate for this project
- How much is the effort provided by the sales and business team
- What kinds of resources are required, people, software, hardware etc
- What is the time frame for the project and what is the acceptable variance in the delivery
- What is the expected Quality in the project- what is the defect density expected in the project
- How much is the dollar realization required at the end of the project
- What is the percentage improvement in skills the people working on the project should have.
- How much should the client be happy with the project, what should be the customer satisfaction survey report at the end of the project.
So in essence a project charter is a document which captures the Financial objective, Sales Objective, HR objective, Quality Objective of the company
Source :-https://www.slateone.com/readonly/index/560/What-is-a-project-charter-in-an-IT-related-project-environment
