---
name: agile-charter
description: 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 Charter

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

1. **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.
2. **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.
3. **Set the objectives** — goals that would demonstrate the vision is
   being achieved, written to [[smart-criteria]]'s standard
   (specific, measurable, actionable, relatable, timely).
4. **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).
5. **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.