{"id":5003294,"date":"2015-12-16T23:38:00","date_gmt":"2015-12-17T07:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aadev22.local\/?post_type=aa_glossary&#038;p=5003294"},"modified":"2022-08-30T11:17:09","modified_gmt":"2022-08-30T18:17:09","slug":"project-chartering","status":"publish","type":"aa_glossary","link":"https:\/\/agilealliance.org\/glossary\/project-chartering\/","title":{"rendered":"Project Chartering"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<div>\n<p>The team develops and maintains a high-level summary of the project\u2019s key success factors, synthetic enough that it can be displayed on one wall of the\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/guide.agilealliance.org\/guide\/teamroom.html\">team room<\/a>\u00a0as a flipchart-sized sheet of paper. This description includes at least the major objectives of the project, scope boundaries, and reciprocal agreements between the project\u2019s implementation team and external stakeholders.<\/p>\n<h2>Signs Of Use<\/h2>\n<p>Ask the team for a high-level overview of the project, and notice what you are first directed to look at. The specific format may be highly variable.<\/p>\n<p>The Agile community has appropriated a number of different techniques or notations that have proven useful to capture high-level project information. For instance the\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/portablelearner.com\/half-notes\/rich-pictures\/\">\u201crich picture\u201d<\/a>\u00a0approach of SSM (Soft Systems); the\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/yourdon.com\/strucanalysis\/wiki\/index.php?title=Chapter_18#The_Context_Diagram\">\u201ccontext diagram\u201d<\/a>\u00a0from structured analysis; or Lean manufacturing\u2019s\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.crisp.se\/lean\/a3-template\">A3<\/a>\u00a0(which derives its name precisely from the paper format).<\/p>\n<h2>Common Pitfalls<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>avoid using any kind of \u201cdocument template\u201d to construct a project charter; the value of the exercise lies more in the activity than in the deliverable, and in focusing on the context-specific information which will guide the team toward good decisions<\/li>\n<li>irrespective of the format, a project charter should fit into a single page or single sheet of paper; anything longer will be regarded as yet another burdensome document, rarely looked at (if ever)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>Expected Benefits<\/h2>\n<p>A common sign of a troubled project is a marked divergence in the answers from members of the same team to questions such as \u201cWhat is the project\u2019s goal? What are its most important aspects? Whose problem are you solving? What resources do you have at your disposal?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Creating a project charter, and even more crucially, ensuring that its contents are \u201cknown and approved by all members of the team\u201d, results in greater alignment of effort within the team, which is often a key determinant of project outcomes.<\/p>\n<h2>Origins<\/h2>\n<p>The adoption of project chartering by the Agile community has been slow and gradual; the slight uptick in popularity as of 2010 presumably originates in the community\u2019s intention to address constant criticism that Agile fails to address \u201cbig picture\u201d concerns.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>2001: the article which will later come to largely define project chartering as an agile practice is published:\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.industriallogic.com\/papers\/Chartering.pdf\">\u201cImmunizing Against Predictable Project Failure\u201d<\/a><\/li>\n<li>2003: Joshua Kerievsky at Industrial Logic publishes \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/industrialxp.org\/\">Industrial XP<\/a>\u201c, a set of proposed extensions to\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/agilealliance.org\/glossary\/xp\/\">Extreme Programming \u00a0(XP)\u00a0<\/a>which includes the Project Chartering activity, essentially as defined by the 2001 article<\/li>\n<li>2006: Jean Tabaka\u2019s book \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/dp\/0321268776\">Collaboration Explained<\/a>\u201d references project chartering as one of the key practices for effective collaboration; though she explicitly cites Industrial XP her presentation differs in several respects from the 2001 article, indicating a synthesis influenced by other sources<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A high-level summary of the project&#8217;s key success factors displayed on one wall of the team room as a flipchart-sized sheet of paper. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8027401,"featured_media":8067461,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","categories":[904],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5003294","aa_glossary","type-aa_glossary","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agilealliance.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/aa_glossary\/5003294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agilealliance.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/aa_glossary"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agilealliance.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/aa_glossary"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agilealliance.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8027401"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agilealliance.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5003294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agilealliance.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/aa_glossary\/5003294\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agilealliance.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8067461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agilealliance.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5003294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agilealliance.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5003294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agilealliance.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5003294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}