Project Charter Generator

About the Project Charter Generator

A project charter is the short document that starts a project: why it exists, what it must achieve, what is in and out of scope, what it may cost, what could go wrong, who is involved and who has signed it off. PMI’s PMBOK® Guide describes it as the document that formally authorises a project and gives the project manager the authority to use the organisation’s resources on it, with the high-level purpose, objectives, deliverables, assumptions, constraints and risks.

Fill in the guided form section by section: basics, purpose and business case, objectives with measures, scope, deliverables, milestones, a budget summary with contingency, assumptions and constraints, top risks, stakeholders placed on a power–interest grid, roles and the approval lines. Start from a template for an IT system, an office fit-out, a customer event or a process improvement, whose wording you change and whose [placeholders] the checks point out until they are filled in. Sections you leave empty are flagged and left out of the charter — never filled with filler text.

Without a pass, the form, the checks and the grid work in full and the charter shows as a free preview. A Premium pass unlocks the PDF, the editable Word file, printing and the charter as text.

Common uses

• Get a sponsor’s sign-off before a project starts, on one or two pages.
• Agree the scope with a client: what is in, and what is explicitly out.
• Start a small internal improvement with the same discipline as a large project.
• Hand a new project manager the reasons, limits and people of a project in one document.

What goes in a project charter

• Basics: the project’s name, the organisation, the sponsor, the project manager, the version and the date.
• Purpose and business case: the problem or opportunity, why now, and the expected benefits.
• Objectives and measures: what the project must achieve, how it is measured and the target that counts as success.
• Scope: what is in and, just as important, what is out.
• Deliverables and how each is accepted; milestones with target dates.
• Budget summary with contingency; assumptions taken as true and constraints the project must work within.
• Top risks with their likelihood, impact and response.
• Stakeholders, roles and responsibilities, and the approval lines.

A charter stays short — the detail goes into the project plan — so each section is a few lines or a small table.

Objectives people can check

An objective without a measure cannot be called met or missed. Give each one a measure (what is counted or observed), a target (the number or result that counts as success) and a date it should be met by. The checks point out objectives without a measure, and measures without a target.

The power–interest grid

Each stakeholder gets two judgements: how much power they have over the project (to approve, fund, block or change it) and how much interest they have in it (how much it affects them). The grid then suggests how to engage them:

• Manage closely (high power, high interest): involve them in decisions and keep them up to date.
• Keep satisfied (high power, low interest): consult them on what matters to them, without detail they do not need.
• Keep informed (low power, high interest): regular updates, and a way to raise concerns.
• Monitor (low power, low interest): light-touch updates; watch for changes.

The grid is your own judgement: revisit it as the project changes.

Empty sections and placeholders

The checks list every section a charter should have that is still empty, and the charter leaves it out rather than filling it with words that say nothing. Template wording is a starting point: what only you know — dates, amounts, numbers, names — is written as a placeholder in [square brackets], and the checks count the ones still to fill in.

The files

• PDF: the charter on A4 or US Letter (your country’s paper by default), with the power–interest grid and signature lines; Compact uses smaller type to keep it to fewer pages.
• Word: the same charter as an editable .docx file.
• Print: the PDF’s pages sent straight to a printer.
• Text: the charter as plain text, to paste into an email, a wiki or a ticket.
• Backup: the charter as a small file you can open again here — your own data, always available.

Limitations

• The charter is a document, not a project plan: the schedule belongs in a plan or a Gantt chart, and the roles in detail in a RACI matrix.
• Likelihood, impact, power and interest are your own judgements on simple scales, not measurements.
• Up to 30 rows in each table and 20 charters in this browser.
• The PDF draws Latin, Cyrillic, Greek and Vietnamese letters; text in other scripts shows as “?” there, and the page says so. The Word file and the text keep it.

Privacy

On this device; its files download once

Everything happens in your browser. Your charters are kept in this browser’s storage on this device and are never uploaded.