Remember recently when I wrote a little about project charters? And I said I was going to say they’re not necessarily relevant in our smaller Cottage PM practices? And then I changed my mind just before I wrote that?
Well, I just reconfirmed that experience. And I’m finding that I’m a new fan of Project Charters in Cottage PM practice!
I have a key organizational objective — one of those really visible ones — to deliver this year. I’m delegating that project to a staff member as a career development item (PM isn’t his day job, but he’s picking this up as a project to grow a different skill set). To do that, I decided to write a proper project charter for the project. Today, we reviewed that together (me, the PM, and the manager who owns the application in question). Here’s what I learned through the process:
- The rigor of writing the charter caused me to changed even my own understanding of and intentions for the project scope. That surprised me; I thought I had it all nicely defined in my mind. But clearly, if it wasn’t so clearly defined in my mind, then there is no way I could have ever communicated that high-level scope properly!
- The rigor of reviewing the charter together gave focus to our scope conversation and let us have conscious, stated agreement to the formal problem statement and the high-level deliverables. We refined both slightly, reflecting our growing group understanding.
With all the document structure, the doc is just over 3 pages long, but the meat of it could fit on a single page, which I think would be better, but we’re using an peer organization’s template to try to support a modicum of consistency.
Now, we’ve scheduled a review the formal sponsor. The PM is building a project workspace in our Novell Teaming implementation to house the Charter, future docs, action items, meeting notes, etc.
I have to admit that achieving clarity so early in a project feels a bit odd. I’m excited by it, and intend to use project charters on all these small projects from now on!
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This is awesome, and I want to point out the part that always makes the most difference for me:
“we reviewed that together (me, the PM, and the manager who owns the application in question)”
Josh
pmStudent.com
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Max Reply:
February 18th, 2010 at 13:50
Thanks, @Josh Nankivel –
That’s the same part that’s probably the most helpful for me, too. It gets right down to the heart of why you do business cases and charters — to get common understanding.
In my first PM training years ago, the instructor drove home one project communication point over and over. Even experienced PMs make the mistake often. The practice of “sending out for review” is not an effective communication strategy. If you really want agreement and alignment, you sit down together and review. “Silence is consent” won’t great that alignment and it won’t protect you when it all goes to hell later because everyone had differing expectations.
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