The point is, you start out with it and maintain it during the course of the project. I never get project charters handed to me in my current work situation, I always write them myself. And I like them short.

According to what I understand from the PMBOK there are 3 things that are absolutely essential for a good project charter, and those are:

• a business case
• the projects constraints
• the assumptions (or dependencies)

Looking at only those 3 things that’s not much is it? Some of the things I always add are:

• high level in scope
• high level out of scope
• communication plan, list of major project stakeholders with their coordinates and roles
• general terms and conditions in the mother language of the sponsor, for legal purposes

I made a mindmap exercise in Freemind a long time ago by looking at some example project charters I got my hands on, the combination I came up with looked a bit like this:

But that’s too long to maintain if you have a high number of relatively short projects to manage.

Today my actual essentials look more like this:

Here’s the big mindmap:

project charter comparison PDF download

Freemind source file (.mm)

I want to share the whole exercise with you, so here you go, source and everything in a variety of formats.