This week we actually reviewed a general Project Charter. In general the initial statement of work is key. Typically all the Business Analyst or Systems Engineer will receive when trying to create the initial Project Charter is a small statement of work from the client. The only way to become proficient at creating Project Charters is by executing the process of creating a Project Charter, the more you perform this work the better you will become. The key is to have a well-defined process. The class should note that the inputs of the Develop Charter process contains a project scope statement. One of the main inputs is the project scope statement or SOW. This is exactly what a project team will receive when creating a project charter.
The next item of interest, is understanding who the stakeholders are and what their expectation of the project are. If we do not understand this how will we validate the project requirements, scope, assumptions and constraints? We need to understand who are key stakeholders are.
As you can see creating the project charter is a lot of work, but once the PMO has a process to create a well-defined charter as we execute new project this activity becomes easier.