What is a Project Charter?
The project charter is a document that formally authorizes a project, assigns a project manager, and provides the authority to apply organizational resources. The approved project charter formally initiates the project.
This document describes the project’s purpose, objectives, and expected benefits.
The project charter should also mention the business case that justifies the project undertaking and required investment.
Different organizations use different names for the same document, for example, Project Statement, Project Definition document, Project Datasheet, Proposal, or Statement of Work.
A Project Charter provides a direct link between the organization’s strategic objectives and anticipated benefits.
The project manager develops this document in collaboration with the sponsor and project requesting organization.
It is advised to start documenting this information early in the project, so everyone is working towards the same goals early on.
Key Elements of a Project Charter
The content of your project statement depends on the size and complexity of your project and whether an internal team or external contractors will deliver the work.
This document should capture high-level information such as:
- Project purpose
- Measurable project objectives and related success criteria
- High-level requirements
- High-level project description, boundaries, and key deliverables
- Overall project risk
- Summary milestone schedule
- Preapproved financial resources
- Key stakeholder list
- Project approval requirements
- Project exit criteria
- The assigned project manager, responsibility, and authority level
- Key deliverables, milestones, and
- The roles and responsibilities of everyone involved in the project.
How to Manage Your Project Charter with Power Apps
If there is no single approach to projects in your organization, adding a simple structure to your project using the statement is an ideal starting point.
Why use Power Apps to manage your Project Charter?
Power Apps allows PMOs and project managers to build custom, low-code applications to manage project management processes right into their existing Microsoft 365 and Power Platform environment.
Some of the benefits of using Power Apps to track your Project Charter includes:
- Low-Code Development: Power Apps allows users to create a custom app with minimal coding knowledge, making it accessible for project managers and team members.
- Seamless Integration: the app integrates well with other Microsoft products like Microsoft 365, SharePoint, Excel, and Dynamics 365, ensuring centralized data management and easy access to project data.
- Customization and Flexibility: Power Apps provides a high degree of customization, allowing you to tailor the Project Charter to meet specific project needs and workflows.
- Enhanced Collaboration: By creating a centralized platform for project information, Power Apps facilitates better communication and collaboration among team members.
- Cost Efficiency: As a part of the Microsoft Power Platform, Power Apps can be a cost-effective solution for developing and maintaining project management tools.
- Data-Driven Insights: With built-in analytics and reporting features, Power Apps helps project managers make informed decisions based on real-time data.
- Security and Compliance: Power Apps ensures that your project data is secure with your own Microsoft 365 environment.
How to manage your Project Charter in Power Apps
Let’s take a look at you could use a model-driven app form in Power Apps to track and manage the information in your project charter.
As you can see in the BrightWork 365 screenshot above, there are fields to capture all the key elements you may need in your Project Charter directly in Power Apps.
- Name – a descriptive name of your project
- Project Reference – a project reference number generated in the system when the project is created
- Project Manager – who is managing this project
- Project Sponsor – who sponsored this project
- Portfolio – link to the portfolio that this project is in
- Program – link to the program that this project is in
- Created On – date the project site was created
- Source Request – link to the original project request (if there was one)
- Teams Channel – link to the Teams channel associated with this project
- Schedule Settings – set working days and exception days for the project
- Project Type – is the project strategic, operational, etc.
- Description – brief explanation of what the project is all about
- Exit Criteria – what constitutes “done” for this project
- Approval Requirements – are there any specific requirements needed to approve the exit criteria
- Out of Scope – what this project is not intended to accomplish
- Priority – note project priority low, medium, high, etc.
- Objectives – what the project is intended to accomplish
- Overall Project Risk – any known risks for this project
- Economic Impact – expected value and ROI to be delivered from this project
Use BrightWork 365 for Project Charters
The Charter tab in BrightWork 365 contains high level metadata about the project, including the project title, stakeholder information, and other key details about the project.
BrightWork 365 Project Charter Templates
BrightWork 365 has five templates out of the box, which sit on a project management process spectrum ranging from light to more formally structured.
All out-of-the-box templates have a Charter tab by default, but the number of fields and the amount of detail changes based on where the template sits on the process spectrum.
Here is an example of how the project charter looks out of the box in the BrightWork 365 Project Light and Project Structured templates. Note how the Charter tab becomes increasingly detailed as the projects move up in complexity.
Charter tab in Project Light:
Charter tab in Project Structured:
Add or remove fields with the Form Configurator
Your organization may have guidelines or templates for the information that is required to be captured in the Project Charter, and it may be more or fewer fields than in one of the out-of-the-box templates.
Using the Form Configurator tool, you can add or remove any form field to the Charter tab in your selected template.
With the Form Configurator you can begin with a middle-of-the-spectrum template such as Project Standard as a good compromise between using the lower project structure of the Project Light template, and the higher end of management complexity found in the Project Structured template.
The different Tabs, Sections, and Columns that are hidden in Project Starter Templates can be turned on or off via the Form Configurator, giving you great flexibility with regard to project management process.
In the screenshot below, you can see the Form Configurator options for the Charter tab in the Project Light template. You simply tick or untick the box to add or remove a form field in your Charter tab in the Project Light template.
When you navigate back to a project that has been created based on the chosen template, the Charter tab will be updated based on the settings in the Form Configurator.
Bring in information from the Project Request
In BrightWork 365 there is an app called the Requests App that is used for managing project intake and approving new projects.
In the Requests App, the Request Details tab contains fields relevant to moving the request process forward as well as fields that will be copied over to the related new project that eventually gets created.
Back to the Charter tab, one of the fields that can be included in the Charter tab in BrightWork 365 is a link to the Source Request.
This is a benefit of centralizing your project management system in Microsoft 365 and the Power Platform using a tool like BrightWork 365.
If the project was based on a request that went through the Request App and the approval workflow process, it will automatically populate the Charter tab with relevant information and also provide a link to the original request in case that is required.