The Phantom Project Charter

We hear about these all of the time, particularly from clients that retain a more bureaucratic organisational structure and rigid financial controls for investments. This tends to lead to a strong program management office (PMO) that tightly controls all project activity. This in itself is not a bad thing… unless the PMO uses this control to usurp some of the basic principles of good project development.

A classic example we see is the project charter. We understand that for some firms, the charter is largely just the means to quickly capture budget. In these situations, the charters we review have (at best) a loose description of the intent of the project, little insight as to the expected business outcomes and a hazy definition of scope. With this lack of precision, the likelihood that the proposed budget is any more than plus or minus 50% accurate is slim. Indeed, the project budget is often developed based on past experience (by the PMs) on similar projects, and therefore does not take into consideration current situations, recent investments or industry trends.

These are phantom charters, in that they appear out of nowhere, they include big scary numbers (because if insufficient analysis is done then the project contingency will increase to cover ‘unknowns’), and then they vanish again, as the charter has no enduring value to the project. To be fair, the PMs often do this because of time pressures they are under and a perceived lack of support. This is where the EAs fit in.

We like TOGAF’s view on the establishment of an architectural vision and the use of iteration to allow a quick, high level (contextual etc) assessment of all architectural domains. The vision document *becomes* the charter, because the definition of intent, desired outcome and success measures should be central to the charter’s content. The high level architectural work gives sponsor, stakeholders and PMs alike a more holistic view of the entire problem and possible solution space. This allows for more accurate planning and budgeting, which will improve the accuracy of the charters.

The challenge to the EAs is simply one of time-boxing, which means working to complete as much analysis as possible at an appropriate level of detail within a fixed window of time. I have seen a number of EA teams effectively engage with the PMO by offering a time-bound architecture service that focuses on improving the quality of project charters. This uses the analysis techniques already familiar to the architects, but simply adds in a time constraint.