What is a Project Charter? | Explained in 4 Minutes

project Charter explained in 10 minutes let's get into it in this video I'll walk you through what a project Charter is and why it's so important a project Charter is a document that defines both what the project is about and what the

goals are before the project starts so why is a project Charter such a big deal well projects take up a lot of your time a lot of resources and they can be really expensive because of these reasons we want to be really intentional with defining what exactly a project

will entail before starting any project you want to make sure that everyone is on the same page and that folks are committed to getting this done let me give you an example let's say you own a baked shop and a number of your customers have requested that you add chocolate chip cookies to your menu so

you have no recipe but you decide to go for it you have a general sense of the ingredients that you will need so you gather your flour your sugar your but your chocolate chips so on and so forth and you start whipping together these

chocolate chip cookies and then you roll them out to your customers once your customers try them come to realize that they're pretty unhappy some of them had wanted more chocolate chips others had wanted the cookies to not be so dense they wanted them to be more thin and

crispy what could we have done differently to avoid this well it probably would have been helpful if we had a recipe or if we had some parameters to Define what exactly your customers had wanted right so think of the recipe similar to a project Charter

it's the blueprint for what you build off of and without that one it's difficult to know what folks expectations are having a well-defined recipe ensures that you're delivering a product or a cookie that your customers will enjoy and having a well-defined

project Charter ensures that you're delivering a project that meets the expectations of everyone involved so now now that we've gone over what a project Charter is let's go over some key areas that a project Charter defines in every Charter there's always a title so what

is the title of the project or the opportunity below the title there's typically a section for project description and think of this as a really highlevel summary for defining why you're doing the project what the project goals are and the reason for the

partnership there's a section for project stakeholders and typically this is where where you define who your sponsors are and who are the main folks who you intend on being involved when we say sponsors think of these as both your internal and your external stakeholders

typically they're executive or leadership level folks they're the ones that give the authorization they're the ones who will need to officially sign off on the charter indicating that the project has started and that folks are aligned within the project Charter there's typically a section for the

project deliver rules and what that means is what exactly do you and the client hope to accomplish throughout this project and by deliverable what this means is what are you delivering to the client what results are you showing so that the client can verify that

you're on track and you're moving in the right direction having deliverables is really important because these are essentially the Milestones that you'll be keeping track of so it's always important to have clearly defined goals clearly defined results that you're sh

your clients furthermore It generally has a summary of the project budget and the timeline in which the client and your teams hope to accomplish the project generally all the content within the project Charter this is negotiable between both the internal team and your

client stakeholders and ultimately the goal here is you want to find a middle ground that makes sense both for you and your partners once everyone's on the same page for the project Charter then your executive sponsors the project sponsors will then sign off on the document and then you're off to the

races the project Charter is so important to project managers because it serves as the foundation for what you'll be building the project management plan off of so to recap before you start any project you should make sure that you have a project Charter in place this

helps with level setting expectations and It ultimately gives you the blueprint for driving the project to completion thanks so much for watching I hope you found this video informative and helpful drop a like as always comment any questions you have and we'll catch you all in the next video