Agile Charter
Use when asked to run an agile chartering session — collaboratively defining a project's vision, objectives, and working agreement with a diverse stakeholder group — as distinct from a formal project charter document (see project-charter), which is written and approved rather than co-created in a session.
Agile chartering sets the direction and goals of a project by bringing a diverse group of stakeholders together to collaboratively define its vision, goals, and objectives — the point is genuine co-creation, so every stakeholder is actually aligned and invested, not just informed after the fact.
Key steps
- Assemble a diverse group — team members, customers, end users, business owners, and other key stakeholders; excluding a perspective here means that perspective's concerns surface later, more expensively.
- Define the vision — the key problem being addressed, the approach to solving it, and the desired outcome, in language the whole group actually agrees on.
- Set the objectives — goals that would demonstrate the vision is being achieved, written to Smart Criteria's standard (specific, measurable, actionable, relatable, timely).
- Identify risks and assumptions — surfaced and evaluated as a group before they're baked silently into the plan, then carried into ongoing project risk management (see Project Management's risk-management section).
- Create a working agreement — the rules, norms, and values that will govern the project, in the sense Ways of Working distinguishes a genuine working agreement (co-developed and committed to) from an imposed policy.
When to run one
Most commonly at project kickoff, but also usable at any point in the project lifecycle to re-align a team and its stakeholders — a mid-project chartering session is a legitimate response to drift, not only a start-of-project ritual.
Common pitfalls
- A chartering session with only the delivery team present — defeats the purpose; the value comes specifically from including customer/ end-user/business perspectives that a delivery-only session would miss.
- Objectives set without SMART discipline — see Smart Criteria; a vague objective can't later be checked against whether the chartering actually succeeded.
- A working agreement that's written but never actually followed — see Ways of Working's glossary distinction between a genuine working agreement and an aspirational document nobody enforces.
- Treating chartering as a one-time event — a team that never revisits its charter as circumstances change misses the tool's value for realigning mid-project.
Learn more
- Project Charter for the more formal, written/approved document counterpart.
- Smart Criteria for the objective-quality check chartering objectives should pass.
- Ways of Working for the working-agreement vocabulary and discipline.