The Importance of a Project Charter: How Do You Manage It in Jira?

[KALOS]

A Project Charter is a crucial document for kicking off any project. It helps define the project’s objectives, expectations, budget, stakeholders, and team roles.

Essentially, it serves as a roadmap that aligns everyone involved right from the start. In Agile environments, there’s often a focus on minimizing formal documentation, which can lead to the Project Charter being overlooked.

However, I believe that a well-defined Project Charter can still add significant value, even in Agile projects, by setting a clear foundation and aligning both the team and stakeholders on shared goals.

I’m curious to hear from the community: Do you use a Project Charter in your projects, and if so, how do you manage it using Jira?

Have you created a custom workflow or used add-ons like Jira Automation, BigPicture, or Tempo Timesheets to track Charter elements within Jira?

Please share your experiences, best practices, and any examples you might have. If you have screenshots or can provide a brief overview of your workflow, that would be incredibly helpful!

Let’s use this space to exchange ideas and find out how we can make the most of the Project Charter in Jira.

[Varsha Joshi]

Currently we do it more in an unformal way of using a confluence page where we identify the usual items that are covered in the charter - objective, business case, team/stakeholders, need dates and any known risks. But in the past, I have also used a formal charter document that needed to be signed by the project sponsor.

[Miles Tillinger]

Atlassian's Playbook has the Project Poster play.  This is usually created and maintained in Confluence.

I have found that as the breadth and complexity of a project or program increases, so does the Project Poster or Charter.  Then we start to lean on more of our standard patterns and play, such as Roles & Responsibilities, RACI matrix, and Decision making patterns.

This is a dated example, but the general structure and flow is still applied for many projects I'm involved in.