BUS605: Strategic Project Management

The project charter and baseline project plan provide a project governance framework for carrying out or executing the IT project. More specifically, the project charter serves as an agreement or contract between the project sponsor and project team – documenting the project's MOV, defining its infrastructure, summarizing the project plan details, defining roles and responsibilities, showing project commitments, and explaining project control mechanisms.

• Documenting the project's MOV – Although the project's MOV was included in the business case, it is important that the MOV be clearly defined and agreed upon before developing or executing the project plan. At this point, the MOV must be cast in stone. Once agreed upon, the MOV for a project should not change. As you will see, the MOV drives the project planning process and is fundamental for all project-related decisions.
• Defining the project infrastructure – The project charter defines all of the people, resources, technology, methods, project management processes, and knowledge areas that are required to support the project. In short, the project charter will detail everything needed to carry out the project. Moreover, this infrastructure must not only be in place, but must also be taken into account when developing the project plan. For example, knowing who will be on the project team and what resources will be available to them can help the project manager estimate the amount of time a particular task or set of activities will require. It makes sense that a highly skilled and experienced team member with adequate resources should require less time to complete a certain task than an inexperienced person with inadequate resources. Keep in mind, however, that you can introduce risk to your project plan if you develop your estimates based upon the abilities of your best people. If one of these individuals should leave sometime during the project, you may have to replace them with someone less skilled or experienced. As a result, you will either have to revise your estimates or face the possibility of the project exceeding its deadline.
• Summarizing the details of the project plan – The project charter should summarize the scope, schedule, budget, quality objectives, deliverables, and milestones of the project. It should serve as an important communication tool that provides a consolidated source of information about the project that can be referenced throughout the project life cycle.
• Defining roles and responsibilities – The project charter should not only identify the project sponsor, project manager, and project team, but also when and how they will be involved throughout the project life cycle. In addition, the project charter should specify the lines of reporting and who will be responsible for specific decisions.
• Showing explicit commitment to the project – In addition to defining the roles and responsibilities of the various stakeholders, the project charter should detail the resources to be provided by the project sponsor and specify clearly who will take ownership of the project's product once the project is completed. Approval of the project charter gives the project team the formal authority to begin work on the project.
• Setting out project control mechanisms – Changes to the project's scope, schedule, and budget will undoubtedly be required over the course of the project. But, the project manager can lose control and the project team can lose its focus if these changes are not managed properly. Therefore, the project charter should outline a process for requesting and responding to proposed changes.

In general, the project charter and project plan should be developed together – the details of the project plan need to be summarized in the project charter, and the infrastructure outlined in the project charter will influence the estimates used in developing the project plan. It is the responsibility of the project manager to ensure that the project charter and plan are developed, agreed upon, and approved. Like the business case, the project charter and plan should be developed with both the project team and the project sponsor to ensure that the project will support the organization and that the goal and objective of the project are realistic and achievable.

Source: Jack T. Marchewka, http://pabipedia.wikidot.com/developing-the-project-charter-baseline-project-plan
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.