Project Charter

1. Overview

A Project Charter is always the starting point of a Business Design project, usually signed by the sponsor and the innovation manager who will be in charge of leading the project team. Typically, a Project Charter (either as Word or Powerpoint file or in our Project Workspace) gives answers to the following questions:

• Motivation: What is your motivation to start this project? (e.g. market pressure, trends, business challenge, new technological capabilities)

• Objectives: What (entrepreneurial) objectives do you want to achieve and how can we measure them? (e.g. new revenue of X, Y new customers in segment Z, cost savings of X)

• Problem statement: What internal / customers' problem(s) do you aim to address?

• Draft solution (optional): What potential solution do you have in mind to mitigate the problem(s)? 

• Assumptions (optional): What assumptions may impede the success of the solutions?

• Schedule: When does the project start and what are important milestones (= workshops)?

• Required resources: What else do we need to become a high-performance team and achieve the objectives?

• Stakeholders: Who would be involved in the first / next iteration of the project and how much time budget do we get over the next 10 weeks?

• Signature of sponsor and innovation manager

The Project Charter usually goes through a couple of iterations to get it concrete and focused enough so that the scope of the project can be handled in 10-weeks cycles. The coach is usually involved in these loops.

2. Example

3. Usage Scenarios

• Describing a product / service / business idea in portfolio management

• Preparing a Business Design project with the sponsor

• Presenting the entrepreneurial challenge and project setup at Kick-off workshop

• Alining different expectations on a project

• Benchmarking the outcome of a Business Design project with the sponsor's objectives at the Decide workshop