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Project Charter One-Pager

Answer ten questions and get a formatted charter your sponsor will actually read.

Ten questions

Name the cost of doing nothing. A charter that cannot answer "why now" rarely survives its first budget review.

One or two sentences. If it takes a paragraph, the scope is not settled yet.

Measurable criteria, one per line. "Users are happy" is not one.

One per line.

The most valuable section in the document. Everything you leave out here comes back as a change request.

The things that physically get handed over. One per line.

Name and date, one per line.

Say who can release contingency, not just how much there is.

The three or four that would genuinely change the plan. One per line.

Role: name, one per line.

Project charter

Accommodations SaaS Platform

Sponsor: Directors, CommercialProject manager: Priya RamanDate: 3 October 2026

What problem are we solving, and why now

Property managers run bookings across three disconnected systems. Double bookings cost an estimated GBP 180k a year in refunds and goodwill, and no single view of availability exists.

What will this project deliver

Deliver a single multi-tenant platform for property listing, availability, booking and payment, live for the first twenty properties by January 2027.

How will we know it worked

  • Zero double bookings across onboarded properties in the first quarter
  • Booking-to-confirmation time under two minutes
  • Twenty properties migrated and transacting by go-live plus thirty days

What is in scope

  • Property and room listing management
  • Pricing and availability engine
  • Booking workflow and calendar sync
  • Subscription billing and invoicing
  • Tenant admin dashboard and RBAC

What is explicitly out of scope

  • Native mobile applications — web responsive only in phase one
  • Multi-currency and tax handling — deferred to phase two
  • Migration of historical bookings older than 24 months

What are the deliverables

  • Production platform with the modules listed in scope
  • Migrated data for the first twenty properties
  • Admin and end-user documentation
  • Support handover pack and runbook

What are the key milestones

  • Core modules complete — 24 June 2026
  • Booking and payment complete — 6 August 2026
  • Development complete — 16 October 2026
  • Go live — 12 January 2027

What is the budget and who holds contingency

GBP 500,000 capital, approved. Contingency of 10% held by the sponsor and released against agreed change.

What are the main risks and assumptions

  • Payment provider sandbox access is on the critical path and is not yet confirmed
  • Client-supplied test data is assumed to arrive by the end of design
  • Billing codebase currently has a single point of knowledge

Who is involved

  • Sponsor: Directors, Commercial
  • Project manager: Priya Raman
  • Tech lead: Ravi Patel
  • Product owner: Sam Okafor
  • QA lead: Fiona Gallagher

Sponsor · signature and date

Project manager · signature and date

How it works

  1. 1Answer ten questions. They open with a worked example so you can see the level of detail each one expects.
  2. 2The document builds as you type, with signature lines for the sponsor and the project manager at the end.
  3. 3Leave a question blank and its section is left out of the document rather than printed empty.
  4. 4Save it as a PDF through your browser’s print dialog, or copy the whole thing as plain text.

Common questions

What is a project charter for?
It is the document that authorises the project and records what everyone agreed at the start. Its real value comes six months in, when someone asks why a piece of work is not being done and you can point at the out-of-scope list.
Which question matters most?
What is explicitly out of scope. Anything you leave unsaid there will arrive later as an expectation somebody believes was always included. It is also the hardest section to write, which is why most charters skip it.
How long should a charter be?
One page. A charter nobody reads authorises nothing. If a section will not fit, that usually means the thinking behind it is not finished.
Is this the same as a business case?
No. A business case argues that the project is worth doing and carries the financial justification. A charter assumes that decision has been made and records the boundaries, the people and the authority.
Is anything saved?
No. Nothing is uploaded and nothing persists — print or copy the text before closing the tab.

The charter names the people. The matrix makes it stick.

Once the roles are agreed, the RACI Matrix Builder turns them into an activity-by-activity picture and checks that every activity has exactly one person accountable.

Build the RACI matrix

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