Guide to Fill in a Project Charter

Guide to fill in a Project Charter

Purpose of Charter

To improve he chances of success for an improvement project

The standard against which to assess project success or failure

To communicate the goal of the team

Roles

Black/Green belt

- the person who will lead/facilitate the project

- responsible for achieving the goal in budget. Submitting a final report to the

corporate facilitation team and ensuring that the QMS, and CI database are

updated

Champion

- a senior manager who can and will insist on the change and who has the

authority to start/cancel projects

- they are responsible for committing the resource and deciding which

project to work on in response to the QMS

- Green Belts in training will have a Black belt mentor assigned by the

champion

Process Owner

– the person who will supervise the people running the process once the

project is completed

Financial Controller

- a recognised Accountant who can apply the Company Benefits model and objectively confirm the budget and benefits that the project is projected to and finally actually incur/realise

- They are responsible for updating the QMS documents and providing the black/green belt with $ figures for the projects impact

Team

– the core expertise needed to address the problem and who will be tasked

to fix it. They are typically reports of the process owner + additional

people who have specialist knowledge or team working skills.

Who should fill in the charter

- The Champion should take the lead. The document must be complete and signed

by Champion, Process Owner, black/green belt, Financial controller.

- Once signed the project should be entered into the CI database.

- Once the project completed the charter should be signed off again by the same

people to confirm that the project has been completed and benefits realized

Fields

Problem statement

A simple description of why the project is needed. 1 or two sentences.

e.g. For the last 12 months Inventory level has been higher than 1M$

Objective ‘or Goal’

A simple description of why the project is needed. 1 or 2 sentences.

Must be objective and SMART

Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-bound

For example

Increase sales of Product X to at least Y per week for 9 successive weeks.

Increase sales of Product X to at least Y per week for 10 weeks out of 12.

Benefit

What the project is worth,. This is calculated using the benefits model available to

your Financial controller or via Dallas.

This is expressed in two ways

Productivity $

Cash/Cost $

Example

Productivity 40K$ Cash/Cost 30K$

Budget

How much expense is allowed by the champion

e.g. How much capital investment, How many days of IT programming, How

many days of input from finance, the team??

This has four purposes

1) So that everyone knows what is expected of them from before the project is started and so can schedule to support it

2) So that the champion can limit the cost of the project

3) To communicate the importance of the project and identify other activities that need to be rescheduled to enable it to happen

4) To identify the return on investment for the project for purposes of project selection

For example

Training costs 2K$

Team of 6 for 3 hours a week for 10 weeks @ 20$ = 3K$

2 Days programming support IT = 400$

New PC hardware = 5K$

1 Day with finance

Team Celebration 1K$

Team Members

Milestones

Each milestone should have a date on which the BB/GB will formally review the project with the Champion / Team and Process Owner

Lean - tidying up the area / process

Benchmark - researching similar processes within/outside the company to identify

scope of opportunity and share with team what a successful implementation may

look like:

D - formalizing the Charter

M - Further Scoping the project. Measuring the starting point, how the goal

will be confirmed, how effective the current process is.

A - identifying what makes the process behave as it does

I- generating, selecting and implementing improvements

C- checking that the improvements are sufficient to achieve the goal in the

charter. Closing the project

QMS- Formally auditing the new processes with QA/QC
How to check your charter

Once you have filled in your first draft please check the following

1) Is the form filled in completely?

2) Is the project clearly a major priority (Benefits>Budget) related to the QMS?

3) Is it obvious why this project is more important than anything else the black/green belt could be working on?

4) Is the project timescale less than 5 months?

5) Is the project planned – (is Budget >0)?

6) Does the problem statement clearly relate to the goal?

7) Does the goal clearly relate to the benefits?

8) Are the benefits measurable?

9) Is the Goal “smart” – i.e. is it achievable?

10) Have finance used the Benefits model? Are the Productivity $ >= Cost/Cash $?