3 Elements All Project Charters Need
Starting a new project can be exciting and stressful at the same time. Therefore, you need to take some steps before starting on a new initiative or project, such as getting approval for your project.
For those who have never been involved in an approval process, collecting the correct information to present your project idea to the stakeholders successfully may be challenging. But you don’t have to worry since there is a practical way to prepare to present your project: creating a project charter with Asana!
What is a Project Charter?
To get approval from the stakeholders on your project, you need to prepare and create a project charter with Asana and include your project’s objectives, scope, and responsibilities. Then, by providing a short but informative explanation about the main elements of your project in the project charter you created with Asana, you can get approval or correction from the stakeholders when needed, before you start to delve into more complex project planning management.
There are several ways you can create project planning material for sure. But let’s check how the project charter you can create with Asana compares to the other project management tools and strategies!
Project Charter and Project Plan
In a project plan, you need to include the goals, success metrics, stakeholders and their roles, the budget, milestones, deliverables, timeline, schedule, and the communication plan.
Therefore, a project plan should build upon your project charter, not the other way around. It would be best if you did not prefer creating a project plan before defining the three elements of the project charter: scope, objectives, and responsibilities. Once you have your project charter ready with Asana, you can fill the critical aspects of your project with detailed information.
Project Charter and Project Brief
You are to create and prepare a project charter to get approval from the stakeholders by clearly presenting what you have in mind. On the other hand, the project brief is the document you should be creating after you get official approval from the project charter you created with Asana.
Therefore, you can think of the project brief as the shorter version of your project charter, which the stakeholders can refer to whenever they want. A project brief should include background information about your project, the objectives and the success criteria, the timeline, and the target audience. And it should be prepared after the official approval as a document to remind everybody about the initial ideas.
Project Charter and Business Case
The project charter and the business case are created and used for the same aim. You can use the project charter you created with Asana or a business case to pitch your project to your stakeholders. However, one element differentiates these two: the scope.
A business case is a document where you are supposed to formally present and explain the benefits or risks of the business investment. Therefore, it can be said that if you are planning on delivering a large-scale investment or a new product, you should create a business case that includes more detailed information since the scope of this project will be much larger. On the other hand, if the scope of your project is relatively more minor like if you are planning on presenting a campaign idea similar to the former campaigns that had been done within the company, you should choose to continue with a project charter and create it through Asana easily.
When should you consider creating a project charter instead of other project planning tools?
Although a project charter can make things easier for you, you should keep in mind that it will not always be the most suitable project planning tool.
Creating a project charter will help if you are going to pitch a project and want to get approval for it from the stakeholders. By creating a project charter with Asana, the stakeholders can directly and clearly understand your project’s objectives, scope, and responsibilities. And then they can assess or decide whether your project can be approved or improved.
You should be using a business case if you plan to present a new business investment since it will provide documentation about the possible project risks.
If your project is already approved, you should use a project plan since it will serve as the next step after creating the project charter that includes more details.
Lastly, you should use the project brief if you want to have a summary of critical elements of your projects in hand.
How can you create a project charter?
By using a project charter, you will share the most critical project details with the stakeholders to receive approval and to start your project.
There are three main project charter elements that will help you understand the “why”, “what”, and “who” aspects.
The “why”
In this part of your project charter, you will be sharing why the project you are presenting is vital and the key objectives it has. You should make sure that the purpose of your project explains why it is important and how it will contribute to the company’s overall goals within the project charter you create with Asana.
By identifying the main purpose and the objectives of your project, you can use the Smart method and ensure that they will be specific, measurable, achievable, and realistic.
The “what”
In the second section of your project charter, you will focus on the project scope. The project scope of the project charter you created with Asana will openly state what is and is not a part of your project to the stakeholders.
You will draw limits and outline what you will or will not do during this project alongside presenting the approximate budget regarding the workflow management.
The “who”
In the last part of the project charter you created with Asana, you will have to provide insight about who should and will be working with you on this project. You should be conducting work management and task management process to show which resources will be allocated throughout the project.
An example of a project charter template
When you are ready to create a project charter template, you can use this template provided here for you, to make things much easier!
- Give a name to your project that is descriptive and informative enough.
- Underline who will be the primary individual others should contact for this project’s details by deciding who will be the project manager.
- Include a last revision date feature, so that team members can have access to your document to check what is going on whenever needed.
- Add your project’s purpose and why you are planning on conducting and managing this project.
- Also, add the objectives of your project; therefore, the deliverables and assets planned to be achieved in the end.
- Add your project’s scope to underline what will and will not be included in your project in detail.
- Decide and add the team members you will be working with on this project and what resources should be ready for this work.
- Lastly, add which stakeholders will be in charge of assessing this project and deciding whether it should be approved or not.
After the stakeholder approves your project charter, the next step is to develop additional in-depth planning documents and start project management.
At this point, our advice for you is to use a project management tool like Asana to ensure all your project details are visible to everyone in your team, and everyone can manage to stay on track at all times. Of course, you can always ask for support from Asana and learn more about the benefits of Asana management!
