When I teach Project Management to non-PM’s, the Project Charter is one of my “points of emphasis”. I state that if they only do one of the things I teach, then the Project Charter is it. All of your planning and execution will be based on the elements contained in there.

The Project Charter is important enough that I will be using future blog posts to examine the contents in detail and include examples. Here are the sections:

• History of the project
• Business Objectives
• Project Objectives
• Scope
• Timeline
• Stakeholders
• Risks and Assumptions
• Issues
• Constraints
• Dependencies
• Sign off