project charter template
One-page project charter built for steering committees. Captures objectives, scope, governance, budget and success criteria.
A project charter is the contract between a project manager and their sponsor. Without one, scope creeps, success becomes subjective, and the PM ends up defending decisions that were never explicitly agreed. This template gives you a single page that does the political work for you.
It deliberately forces clarity on the four areas projects most often fail on: objectives (what does success actually look like?), out-of-scope (what are we explicitly not doing?), governance (who decides what, and when?) and tolerance (when do we escalate?). If a sponsor will not sign a one-page charter, that is itself important data.
Use it as a Word/PDF artefact for sign-off, or generate it live from your project setup wizard in Pocket PMO and have the AI Project Team prompt you for any missing fields.
What's inside
- •One-page layout suitable for steering committee approval
- •SMART objectives section with measurable success criteria
- •In-scope / out-of-scope columns
- •Governance: sponsor, PM, steering committee, decision rights
- •Tolerance bands (cost, time, scope), when to escalate vs proceed
- •Sign-off block for sponsor and PM
When to use it
- •Before any work starts, no charter, no work
- •After business case approval, before mobilisation
- •Re-baselining after a major change request
- •Onboarding a new sponsor or PM mid-project
Template structure
Every section below appears in the downloadable PDF as a ready-to-fill table.
Project identity
Background & rationale
Objectives (SMART)
Scope
Governance
Tolerance
Approval
Use it live in Pocket PMO
The PDF is fine. The live version is better: auto-fill from your project, full audit trail on every change, AI Project Team drafts the tricky sections, and steering committees see one canonical version, not a stale spreadsheet copy.