Analysis of Project Charter's Role in Securing Commitment

This report examines the role of a project charter in fostering both formal and informal commitment within project settings. The charter is defined as a preliminary document outlining project goals, scope, results, milestones, schedule, and available resources. It is typically drafted by the project manager and team, seeking approval from top management. The primary function of a project charter is to authorize the project, clarify all aspects, filter project aspects, and identify projects with the best cost-benefit ratio. The report emphasizes the importance of the charter in establishing roles, duties, and responsibilities, facilitating commitment, and managing resources. It discusses the need for project authorization and executive overview, which enables all team members to understand the overall purpose of the project. The report also explores whether a project charter is mandatory for commitment, highlighting that while instructions from top management can define scope and authorize resources, a charter is essential for authorization and comprehensive project management.

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Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation
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2. Explain how a charter helps source both formal and informal commitment
A project charter is an inner eye which explains the preliminary description of the goals, project
scope, project results, milestones, schedule and the project’s available resources. Typically, the
project manager together with the help of other team members, draft the project charter and seek
approval from the top management or the sponsor of the project. The primary purpose of the
project charter is its authorization of the project, giving a clear understanding of all aspects
involved in the project and the team members, filter project aspects and identify the project
which provides the client with the best benefit to cost ratio (Wu 2019). The project charter
includes the project scope, schedules, milestones, business case, risk management, project
assumptions, all the stakeholders, lessons learned from the project and the signature phase. Both
the formal and informal projects need a project charter since they need collaborations and
cooperation from all the teams involved, limited time to accomplish, limited resources, fixed
demand goal to be achieved and preparation for the worst scenario (Kahn 2019). The charter is
used in documenting and tracking the limited resources available to the project.
Projects are usually initiated by the sponsors, chairpersons of the management team or the
project manager of a firm. Project charter plays a role of establishing roles, duties and
responsibilities among the team members. If the project is sponsored or managed by more than
one organization, it enables in creating commitment and smooth partnership among them. The
charter deals with the project contracts which commits the organizations and gauges if the parties
in the project are trustworthy or not (Eyers & Naim, 2019). Therefore, it is used in managing and
ensuring commitment of members in meeting the assigned duties and roles in the project through
enforced contracts.

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Both the formal and informal projects require authorization for the project manager in charge to
commence the approved plan and get clearance in using the available resources to attain the
goals set for the project. It helps the executive, and the project sponsors to commit to the project
after seeing the business value and the potential of the project’s success (Chipidza, George, and
Koch, 2016). This is after they have referred to the charter to ascertain the level of closeness the
project is tied to its strategies useful in attaining business goals. It helps in gaining commitment
as it provides a broader executive overview for the project one that any new member in the
project team can refer and evaluate the overall purpose of the project.
All the above information underlines the importance of a project charter in ensuring commitment
of all team members in the project. But do we need a project charter to commit to the project?
The primary purpose of the project charter is to offer a formal authorization of the
commencement of the project and a go-ahead to use the available resources (Meredith, Mantel Jr,
and Shafer, 2017). Lack of the charter can lead to the project being cancelled at any time or
attract audit as an unauthorized project. In a scenario of a project without a charter, we will have
a manager in charge without authority, no proper project direction and expectations of the project
will be limited as well as the overall scope of the project will be ambiguous (Dalton 2019). But
all this can be obtained through the project sponsor or top-level management. Instructions are
given by the top management and/or project sponsor can lead to a clear understanding of the
project, define its scope and authorize the manager to use the available resources in completing
the project. This may render the use of the project charter in committing to the project both in the
formal and informal setup not mandatory.

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References
Chipidza, W., George, J. and Koch, H., 2016. Chartering Predictive Analytics: A Case Study.
Dalton, J., 2019. Project (Team) Chartering. In Great Big Agile (pp. 211-213). Apress, Berkeley,
CA.
Eyers, D., & Naim, M. (2019). Project management for effective operations management. In
Contemporary Operations and Logistics (pp. 11-27). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
Kahn, P.W., 2019. Origins of Order: Project and System in the American Legal Imagination.
Yale Law Library Legal History.
Meredith, J.R., Mantel Jr, S.J. and Shafer, S.M., 2017. Project management: a managerial
approach. John Wiley & Sons.
Wu, T. (2019). Achieving Organizational-Wide Support: The Effective Use of a Project Charter
in an Enterprise Project. Journal of Critical Incidents.