What Is a Project Charter? How to Sell Projects to Stakeholders

You can't start business projects without approvals from stakeholders and project committees. 

The need to get project approvals leads project managers to create project charters. Project teams use project management software to collaborate, schedule tasks, create project plans, and develop a charter. You'll learn how to create a project charter in this article, especially if you're new to project management. 

Project managers write project charters to explain the business case, specify benefits, and streamline resource allocation. A project charter keeps sponsors, teams, and stakeholders on the same page about project objectives and goals.

Project charters outline the risks and benefits of projects and identify the exact business problem projects are solving. These elements sound familiar because they're in the more extensive project management document, a business case.

Not all businesses will create a project charter as a solo document; some will wrap a project charter and a business case into one. Before working on a project charter, ensure you speak with your company's management and understand their expectations and preferred documents. 

Now that you’re familiar with the basics, let’s review the various elements that make up a project charter.

Elements of a project charter

To ensure you’ve included all that your business deems necessary in a project charter, be sure to consult with a member of management or even a stakeholder. Below are the project charter elements to include in a charter.

• Goals and business problems: First and foremost, a project charter should define the business problem a project seeks to solve. What is the purpose of this venture? Increased revenue? More site traffic?
• Project team members: This part of a project charter lists all involved in the project’s execution and their roles. Will you need the graphic design team to spend a week of their time helping you build a website? List that here.
• Stakeholders: Also referred to as project sponsors, this part of the charter lists the decision-makers in upper management and those with c-suite titles and executive roles. Stakeholders often have the authority to approve or deny a plan and can allot more resources to a project when needed.
• Requirements and costs: What will you need to complete a project? Include this in the project charter, as it will help you streamline the approval workflow.
• Project constraints: What might hold this project back from succeeding? What do you lack that might change your performance? What could impede progress? Think of all of these things and include them here.
• Solutions: A project manager (PM) is responsible for discovering the best solution to a problem. In this section of the project charter, a project manager will list the various solutions they think could be applied to a business problem. PMs should be sure to outline which solution they prefer to execute. Additionally, how can you solve the constraints listed in the previous section?
• Milestones: A project milestone is a start date, end date, and any accomplishment in between. How will you determine when a project begins, when it ends, and what other steps in the middle determine success? List your milestones, so other management members and stakeholders know what events to look for in this project life cycle. A project management tool is helpful in monitoring project milestones.
• Project risks: Risks differ from constraints in that risks define what could go wrong within a project as opposed to the existing limitations at the start of a project. Communicating risks shows managers you’ve had the foresight to consider potential issues.
• Project deliverables: What physical, readable, communicable results are you hoping to develop from this project? This section is perhaps the most crucial part of your project charter, as it’s the section wherein you can communicate to management the results at the close of a project.

Now, let’s look at a sample project charter template. 

Project charter example

Let's say your digital marketing team is creating an ad campaign project to generate leads. Below is a sample project charter for this project. 

Project plan vs. project charter vs. business case

A project plan, also known as a work plan, is a formal document that outlines different project control and execution stages. It includes project objectives, deliverables, communication plans, Gantt charts for milestones, and a work breakdown structure (WBS). 

A project charter offers a project overview and includes the project scope, schedule, budget, and resources. 

A business case has the same fundamentals as a charter but a different scope. It justifies why the team is undertaking the project and how its benefits outweigh the costs. Good business cases also offer alternative options and rationale for the preferred solution.

How to write a project charter

Now, let’s look at how to create a project charter. Ideally, these sections should be shorter as they guide readers to different project planning documents.

• Include a general project overview. This project information section should contain the project name, description, stakeholders, project sponsors, and team members.
• Explain project team roles and responsibilities. This is where you dive deep into identifying reporting managers, project contributors, defining their duties, and spotting dependencies.
• State measurable project goals and objectives. Project objectives define specific milestones toward project success, whereas objectives explain high-level project benefits.
• Justify the business case. Explaining how project stakeholders will get the return on investment helps you get their approval faster. That’s why project managers use this section to describe the business need of a project and sell it to sponsors and stakeholders.
• Mention the project scope. Setting precise project scope management details helps you define in-scope items and processes for handling out-scope tasks.
• Set a project timeline. Creating a project schedule early on keeps stakeholders aware of key deliverables and milestones.
• Define project costs. This section outlines the project budget and who has the spending authority.
• Lay out assumptions and constraints. Use this section to define assumptions and explain how you’ll deal with project constraints.
• Identify risks. Highlighting potential project risks help you plan for risk management and define teams responsible for handling those risks.
• Define success criteria. This is where you explain what success will look like. Project teams, sponsors, and stakeholders must agree on the success metrics to kickstart a project.

Project management software

Best-in-class project management software solutions help you create project plans, manage multiple projects, schedule them, allocate resources, and facilitate change management. Project managers use project management tools to better collaborate and communicate with different project stakeholders.

To be included in the project management software category, a product must:

• Offer multiple project views
• Provide project templates
• Create WBS and project plans
• Define and allocate resources
• Manage task interdependencies
• Generate critical path for project changes
• Track actual costs against project budgets
• Monitor project progress and resource utilization
• Support waterfall, agile, and other project management methods

*Below are the five leading project management systems from G2's Fall 2022 Grid® Report. Some reviews may have been edited for clarity.

1. Asana

Asana is a leading project and work management software that helps teams streamline everything from small tasks to strategic initiatives.

What users like:

“The interface is beautiful, and the gamified tweaks, like celebrations after completing tasks, make Asana fun to use. A fun user experience is the single most important factor in long-term use, in my opinion. I also love that Asana constantly solicits user feedback via platforms like the Asana Forum."

- Asana Review, Alison P.

What users dislike:

“In some of the fields, such as calendar view, it is not always easy to edit a project, so you do have to remember to toggle between the different view options for full functionality. When working during team meetings, you also want to make sure everyone on the team is looking at the same information and the same view on the screen to track effectively. It does take some time to set up and onboard."

- Asana Review, Felicia T.

2. Smartsheet

Smartsheet is an enterprise platform that enables individuals and teams to plan projects, execute them, and report at scale.

What users like:

“I like how Smartsheet integrates MS Excel and MS Project functionalities in a single package. This makes Smartsheet a really powerful tool and easy to learn. Another thing I love about Smartsheet is the ability to create survey forms from your sheets you can send to clients or employees. This tied to the live dashboard functionality makes Smartsheet a great tool for live real-world data visualization."

- Smartsheet Review, Manuel S. 

What users dislike:

“When starting with Smartsheet, it may take some time to become familiar with the app and its various shortcut icons. It could take a few seconds to locate the symbol I need, even after a few weeks of practice. Reconnecting every few minutes is annoying, and the session break is too short."

- Smartsheet Review, Laik E. M.

3. monday.com

monday.com features different project management building blocks so that you can customize workflows in any way you want and improve productivity.

What users like:

“It's simple to use and easy to manage for the wider team and me. I can create anything from a simple client ticket to creating client project boards for multiple departments. There are a lot of great functions we use daily, including tracking, sub-item tasks, CRM, board sharing, project status, email notifications, and more."

- monday.com Review, April T.

What users dislike:

“The only downside of using monday.com is the steep learning curve. I've had to help some of our employees learn the ropes, which has been confusing for them. Employees who do not have English as a first language find it especially difficult.

I'm also surprised that it took so long for me to learn how I could personally use monday.com to help streamline my processes. I think it would be helpful if more help videos show how to use monday.com for first-time users and informative videos that show all the different ways it is possible to use monday.com to its full potential."

- monday.com Review, Ruth B.

4. ClickUp

ClickUp is an all-in-one productivity solution ideal for teams to plan, organize, and collaborate on tasks and projects of all sizes.

What users like:

“ClickUp is easy to grasp for basically anyone but has plenty of in-depth features that make it wildly robust and customizable. Their constant updates also help to provide a useful feedback loop for improving the site in ways that are relevant to our team.

ClickUp is easy to templatize when needed and easy to customize when needed to give you the perfect balance of time savings and exactly what you want for a project. The ClickUp team is very transparent and listens closely to their users, taking their best feedback and suggestions to heart and constantly improving the platform."

- ClickUp Review, Thom S.

What users dislike:

“The desktop application should support running in the background (and not close when you hit the X) or at least give the option to control that. I wish the desktop application made it easier to find the import function (I have to hunt it down). Also, I want the desktop application to support natively viewing/downloading attached files rather than downloading them from the website."

- ClickUp Review, Shane W.

5. Wrike

Wrike is a work management platform that helps teams collaborate faster and focus on purposeful work.

What users like:

“I love the consistency and transparency that we have with our team when using Wrike! We used to use too many spreadsheets and manila folders to track all of our jobs, which frequently got lost and resulted in staff wandering the office to look for the missing folders. Since we implemented Wrike, we now know the status of all jobs with a click of a mouse!"

- Wrike Review, Caitlin B.

What users dislike:

“The user interface could use some work. For new users, it isn't intuitive. It takes some time to get used to navigating the platform and finding the features that are most useful to you. Also, other platforms offer more robust fields for projects, like important links, approvers, dependencies, etc. Would be nice for Wrike to add these in."

- Wrike Review, Adam D.

Consider this territory... charted

Now that you know how to write a project charter, you can get to work on one of your own! Every new project feels like unchartered territory until you get to it. The charter is the starting point for the project, and now it's time to work on it and complete it on time.

Check out how project onboarding can help you overcome unforeseen obstacles, communication problems, and budget issues.