6 SOW Templates to Create a Statement of Work That Delivers
Project initiations are stressful, particularly for product managers. They have to gather the right information from different teams and present it in a structured way for project stakeholders. They’re also responsible for creating deadlines to ensure it's delivered on time. It all amounts to a lot of mental Olympics when launching a new project.
Lack of proper documentation—like a project charter—could put you in a bit of a pickle where you have to define project requirements, objectives and business cases.
That’s why it’s crucial to prepare a detailed project charter. This document includes clear definitions and requirements regarding your target goals, value propositions, product details, milestones and company readiness.
Read on to learn more about what a project charter is and what it should include. We’ve also included templates to help you create an effective project charter.
Key Elements of a Project Charter
How To Write a Project Charter in 6 Steps
10 Project Charter Templates You Can Use Right Away
Get Started With a Project Charter Template
A project charter serves as a reference document throughout the entire process. Think of it as a single source of truth. It’s a centralized document containing all the important high-level information about a project.
A project charter is a single point of reference for the project manager and the team. It enables project teams to continually keep track of progress and ensure that they are working toward the same goal.
A project charter helps you become well-organized with clearly defined project needs and elements, so there’s less risk of going off-track and deviating from your goals. It is usually created before a project plan and highlights high-level information such as objectives, scope and responsibilities. Once your project charter is ready, you can add more details like a communication plan, success metrics and schedule to your project plan.
A project charter should define these three key elements:
What is the ultimate goal of the project? Is it to redesign your website to improve user experience? Are you looking to add a new feature to your existing product to generate additional revenue? Or do you want to optimize your current marketing campaigns?
A well-defined project charter contains a clear scope with key requirements, open-ended specifications and the main parameters of the project. It also highlights the limitations and identifies specific milestones for each member involved.
By clarifying your project’s scope, you can ensure you hit your project objectives and goals without any guesswork or delay. It’s important to align with key stakeholders and gather their ideas on the scope of the project-this will ensure you’re all on the same page.
Defining roles and responsibilities on projects can be intimidating. With more horizontal management structures than vertical, there are often too many decision-makers which could hamper the speed and quality of the project. It’s important to lay out exactly who must sign off on project resources, what the major deliverables are and who’s responsible for them.
Project managers can assign roles and everyone in the team can check in on their responsibilities and goals at individual and global levels.
Here’s an example of what a project charter looks like. You can tweak the template below to capture the key elements of your own project.
From the outset, a project charter can seem like a simple framework for outlining the project’s objectives - that is, until it becomes incredibly complex. Defined scope of work, detailed deliverables, roles and responsibilities and budget approvals can quickly add up to a muddled document.
With the right system in place, creating a project charter that gets approval from your key stakeholders to kick off the project can seem effortless.
Here are six simple steps to writing a project charter.
To begin your project charter, clearly define your project goals and purpose.
This is a space for you to communicate your goals before and during the project. You can also define a measurable way to evaluate your success after the project ends. That way, all the stakeholders know “what” you plan to achieve with your project.
Adding relevant context and background information about the project helps teams understand the “why” behind a project. This ensures that everyone involved works towards a shared goal with equal footing.
When you’re defining the goals and purpose of a project, aim to answer questions like:
Think about what problems you are trying to solve with this project—pain points, challenges, customer feature requests, product upgrades and more. This will help you lay out your “why” and “what” in a much more detailed and precise manner.
Use this goal-setting worksheet to document and share project goals with your team.
Project deliverables help you define the project's scope and identify what falls within and outside of this scope. You can create deliverables for both external and internal stakeholders.
For example, if the project is to develop a new website, then a design requirements document will be a deliverable for the external stakeholder (the client). And the website will be your deliverable.
Without project deliverables, your project scope may expand beyond its original scope. This might put your team under unnecessary pressure and add up resource expenses.
Having proper deliverables laid out in the project charter will help you set boundaries. More importantly, it outlines exactly what you need to do during the project timeline.
Imagine that you’ve hired a graphic designer to create some bold visuals for your upcoming webinar. You already have a brand style guideline, previous templates to show for reference and a design tool like Visme. Perhaps you have a seasoned graphic designer in your team who can help accelerate the learning process of the new designer.
A week later, the designer shares a draft of the visual with you. You progressively refine your requirements and after a few meetings, the designer understands your needs. Now the designer has a much higher chance of meeting your expectations.
That’s why you need to clearly define your project requirements. In the above example, the requirements were a design tool, a brand style guideline and an experienced professional.
Project requirements drive every stage of the project. Typically, high-level requirements are documented in the project charter (aka early stage). This includes all the technical and non-technical resources you need for your project.
For example:
Remember, since a project charter is a flexible document, there’s no need to add detailed project requirements at this stage. But it’s a good idea to narrow down on the bigger requirements that’ll help you kickstart the project.
A project charter will include any risks you’ve identified. It’ll be a roadmap to identify every possible pothole and accident-prone area in your project lifecycle, so you can be ready to tackle and solve it.
You can answer questions like:
No need to get into the nuances of each risk, but highlight the impact they may have on your project. Once you have done this, it will help you go in-depth when creating your risk management strategy in the planning phase.
The success of your project is largely tied to everyone understanding their roles and responsibilities. Think of it like this. You don’t want to lose out on precious resources, cost and time deciding things like:
When everyone understands their roles and responsibilities, they can perform their assigned tasks efficiently, leading to faster production and deployment. You need a clear chain of command to get better clarity on what issues may arise before, during and after the project and who should be responsible for them.
While you only need to briefly define the roles and responsibilities in your project charter, it should clarify many things for your team.
Example:
In the final section of your project charter, you should mention an estimated budget and timeline for the project. Here, you can either mention a high-level overview of your budget and timeline or break it down into various phases of delivery or tasks.
For instance, you can show your timeline broken down into key deliverables, milestones and project stages to give a big picture to the stakeholders. Similarly, you can break down the budgets based on resources, tools, training as reflected in the example below.
With a well-designed and clear structure, this project charter template is the perfect choice for breaking down a complex project into smaller, understandable milestones. It clearly lays out the key elements of the project without overwhelming the reader with too much information.
You can fully customize the look and feel of the template. Feel free to edit content, change images, apply custom colors, add your brand’s logo and fonts and much more. Perhaps you can use it for a marketing campaign project, a sales enablement campaign, or even a development project in your organization.
Planning and execution are the keys to a great construction project. But it can be overwhelming to think about every single task that needs to get done.
How many professionals do you need for this project? What are the raw materials needed? How to define milestones? How many days should you allocate for the entire project?
With this construction project charter template, you can easily map out your entire construction workflow and manage milestones. Use it to share information with external stakeholders and your team to track deliverables, plan and execute your strategy and more.
You might be working on a new marketing campaign to increase leads. Or you might be developing a small feature to fix an issue in your existing product. Or perhaps you want to improve the customer user experience by undertaking a small project.
Lean projects can quickly get lost in a jungle of organizational data or even fall through the cracks completely when submitted through different channels and formats. To make sure all projects are accessible to relevant stakeholders and well-documented, you need to create a project charter.
This project charter template will help you simplify your project's workflow and define objectives and constraints. It features design elements like icons, tables, images and more. These elements will make it easier for you to represent critical information in a more easy-to-understand and digestible format.
Agile project management requires teams to collaborate regularly. Everyone must be on board about what they need to work on, the priority order in which tasks should be done and how they should be done.
By creating a project charter, you can translate your Agile work into a clear document that lays out the high-level information about the project lifecycle, who’s working on what, what the milestones and timelines are and more.
You can plan effective and efficient agile processes with this template. Our agile project charter template is your one-stop-document to share your project’s objectives in advance, highlight key stakeholders and present critical information like timelines, budget, processes and more.
Creating a visually appealing project charter with an elegant layout is important to engage your reader and convey useful information quickly.
With this customizable project charter template, you can map out your project’s goals and objectives, constraints, roles and responsibilities and processes with the relevant stakeholders.
There’s plenty of white space, making it as clutter-free as possible. And this is important because having balanced white space in your documents directly impacts how your reader perceives and retains information.
Elements such as graphs, images and icons are a great way to add visual breaks to a document. They help you highlight important takeaways and critical data so readers can quickly skim through the content and fully understand the details of your project.
If you’re not sure where to start, try this well-designed project charter template. It will help you add visual elements for milestones, benchmarks, objectives, performance and more.
If you’re organizing a health-related drive, your stakeholders must understand the project’s scope, resources required, duration and your team. This healthcare project charter template lays out exactly that in an engaging, crisp manner, so readers know the objective of the health drive and other details.
You can easily customize this project charter template to add more specific details about your campaign using Visme’s editor. It also allows your team to coordinate with the editor and share their feedback. Right from adding icons, images and graphs to changing the brand colors of your documents, Visme lets you do it all without any hassle.
No two projects are exactly alike, but every project needs a project charter with all the basic details in place. Clear goals, objectives, timeline, deliverables and estimated budget helps different stakeholders understand the structure of your project on a high level.
This project charter template is simple yet engaging purely because of the way it’s formatted. It uses different font sizes to help the reader’s eye to navigate through the document. Also, there’s a good amount of white space that allows the reader to focus on the important elements of the project charter including:
Instead of adding too much information, keep it short, simple and crisp. Use this project charter template and include the key information about your project, such as the scope, milestones and more.
Gone are the days when project planning used to be a tedious, mundane process. Tools like Visme help ensure that you create solid documents for your organizational purposes while embedding visual elements that increase engagement and retention.
In this template, you can experiment with colors, fonts, icons, images and more visual elements to create an eye-catching project charter.
This template features a bold color palette, high-quality images and well-designed text blocks that are easy to read. You can show the details of the project, such as the project objective, scope, milestones, risks and roadblocks. Moreover, you can also add your proposed budget and time for the project.
Are you a freelance website developer? Or maybe you’re a content writer who often sends a project charter when onboarding a new client. If you’re looking for a simple yet effective project charter template, this one from Visme is the perfect fit.
If you are an agency owner, you can customize the color palette to match your brand’s tone and style. The project timeline comes with a graphical element that lets you visually represent the timeline for your clients.
Kicking off a new project can be overwhelming, especially if you’re the one responsible for its managing and implementing the project.
No matter how incredible your project is or how critical your objectives are for your organization, you need to use a well-designed project charter template. It helps you convey the context and need for a project to relevant stakeholders. Otherwise, you risk losing the votes of your stakeholders if they can’t truly understand the why, what and how of your project.
With Visme’s easy-to-use professional document creator, you don’t need to build a project charter from scratch. Pick a project charter template and start customizing it to your needs.
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