What is a project charter?
A project charter is a short, formal document outlining the project’s objectives, scope and key stakeholders. It’s a foundational agreement that sets the tone and direction for the entire project, ensuring everyone involved is aligned on goals, timelines and responsibilities.
A well-constructed project charter provides clarity and reduces the risk of miscommunication or scope creep later down the line. It functions as a clear reference point, guiding teams through challenges and changes so they can deliver results. Whether you’re launching a new product or improving internal processes, a solid project charter ensures your team is unified in its approach and equipped to succeed. By investing time in creating a clear project charter, you set your project up for smoother execution and better outcomes.
Why use a project charter template?
A project charter template guides you through the process of creating a project charter efficiently and effectively. It helps you to streamline your project management process, reduce risks and set your team up for success.
Here are some of the top benefits of a project charter template:
Clarity and alignment: The template ensures that your project’s objectives, scope and deliverables are clearly defined from the start. This keeps all stakeholders aligned and avoids confusion later on, minimizing miscommunication and ensuring everyone is on the same page. Our template helps you capture the "why" behind your project — outlining its purpose, identifying potential risks and clarifying deliverables.
Time-saving and efficiency: Our template provides a ready-to-use framework, saving you the hassle of starting your project charter completely from scratch. You won’t have to worry about missing critical details, as each section prompts you to include essential information, saving valuable time and effort. Instead of guessing what information needs to be included, the template guides you through each step, ensuring that your project charter is thorough and aligned with best practices.
Improved stakeholder buy-in: A well-structured project charter helps you present your project in a professional and organized manner. This increases the likelihood of gaining stakeholder approval and securing the necessary resources. It acts as your project’s “elevator pitch,” ensuring that decision-makers see the value and urgency of your initiative.
Risk management: By laying out potential risks early on, the project charter template allows you to anticipate and plan for challenges before they arise. This proactive approach to risk management ensures smoother project execution and fewer unexpected hurdles.
When to use the project charter template
A project charter template is a highly useful and versatile tool, applicable across a wide range of industries and project types. Whether you’re managing large-scale initiatives or smaller internal projects, having a structured charter is essential.
Here are some examples of industries that can use the project charter template successfully:
Banking and finance: For projects requiring strict regulatory compliance, detailed risk management or multi-departmental coordination.
Healthcare: To manage initiatives that might involve patient care improvements, compliance with health standards or cross-functional teams in hospitals and clinics.
Manufacturing: When overseeing projects involving product development, facility expansion or improving supply chain efficiency, ensuring precision and coordination.
Public sector: For government and public service projects where transparency, accountability and stakeholder alignment are key to success.
How to use the project charter template
Step one: Set up and customize tasks
In our template, we’ve included plenty of tasks you can expect to need when creating a project charter. These include “defining project objectives”, “drafting risk management plans” and “reviewing project objectives with stakeholders.” Each task contains a checklist for more thorough and streamlined planning.
Feel free to customize or remove these tasks to suit your project needs. You can also add your own checklist items and attachments to each task or create new tasks from scratch. Simply click “+ Add Task” in the relevant column to include your new task.
Step two: Schedule your tasks
Outline when you’ll work on each part of the project charter creation process to build a clear timeline. This will help you and your stakeholders to get a clear overview of what needs to be done by when. To do this, add a start and end date for each task in the task sidebar. Your tasks will appear in Timeline, MeisterTask’s Gantt chart view, in your project board.
With all tasks visible in Timeline, you can easily identify resourcing gaps and potential blockers, and adjust your timeline accordingly.
Step three: Assign tasks and add accountability
Assign each task to a team member and leave any relevant comments to provide more context. By including team members who will execute the project early on, you can ensure expectations and resources are aligned. Their feedback will help shape your final project charter document.
You can also add “watchers” to specific tasks. Watchers are stakeholders who must be consulted or informed about a task, but are not responsible for it. To add a watcher, click on the “Watching” section on the right-hand side of the specific task. You can then click on the relevant person or search for their name in the toolbar.
Step four: Organize and track progress
As you work through each checklist item in your task, tick it off to track your progress. When all checklist items are complete, you can mark the task as done using the “Complete Task” button.
Once every task in your board is complete, you’re ready to kick off your project!
