Table of Contents
Introduction
I have participated in too many project initiation meetings where, after a project charter presentation, only a couple of team members would actually read the document. Not because it’s unimportant. Quite the opposite: according to Atlassian’s own guide to project charters, a well-formed project charter actually defines a project’s objectives, scope, and areas of responsibility for everyone before any work begins.
The issue was the format. Most of the project charter templates I could find online were six to seven pages long, full of dense paragraphs and bracketed text. A founder or a product owner looks at this intimidating document and feels like they can read it next week.
In my own project work, I’ve found that the problem isn’t always the information itself. It’s often how quickly someone can understand it. When founders, product owners, or busy technical stakeholders review a project charter, I prefer a format that lets them quickly see the project objective, milestones, responsibilities, scope, and major risks without having to read through several pages first. That’s what led me to redesign my own project charter as a one-page visual summary.
The five points below explain why this happens and how I’ve addressed this in my own project charter template.
1. 📝 Too Much Text, Not Enough Signal
Most charters ask for too much text: objective, business case, scope, and risk. Everything looks similar on a page because it’s all written in full sentences.
What would a founder skimming through your charter care about? The objective, timeline, and anything that stands out as negative or positive. You could have a single line for the objective, another for the business case, and so on.
2. 📅 No Visual Sense of Timing
One thing many PMs and TPMs mention when discussing their stakeholders’ wants/needs is that they often don’t know if a project is on time or not without being told.
A table with all of the dates for each activity’s start and finish makes it clear, but that’s a lot to look through and process.
A visual of a timeline with each activity and its status in a different color block makes a much more immediate sense to a stakeholder looking at the document. A clear sense of the timing of the project’s progress can be had in just a few seconds at a glance.
3. 🚦 Status Buried In Prose Instead Of Color
If your risk register or milestone status says “currently at moderate risk due to vendor delay”, you’re making busy readers do more work than they need to.
That’s why you see red, amber, and green so often in the status field of PM tools: it’s a widely used shorthand that anyone can process without extra effort. I’ve written before about calculating RAG status from sprint data, and not making it up – the same principle applies here.
4. 👥 Stakeholders ‘Roles’ Left Vague
Many charts categorize stakeholders by title/name only. The more useful question for stakeholders is not simply what their title is, but what role and responsibility they have within the project.
This can be best represented in the form of a RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) structure, which essentially summarizes the obligations of each stakeholder in one word per individual.
5. 🎯 Use Of Bullet Points As Opposed To Concise Sentences
“While this project will focus on redesigning the checkout experience, it will intentionally leave out any changes in the backend payment infrastructure” is a very understandable sentence. However, it could take a very long time to parse this under pressure
Two columns with a few bullet points, one green for in scope and one red for out of scope, would say the same thing in about two seconds.
Building It as One Visual Page
I redid my own charter template, based on the five issues mentioned above. I added compact cards with project stats for the executive summary, a proper color-coded timeline for milestones, a RACI-lite version of the stakeholder matrix, and divided the scope section into two visual columns, as opposed to paragraphs.
The goal wasn’t to remove important project information. I wanted to change how the information is organized and presented so that decision-makers could see the most important details first. The executive summary provides a quick snapshot of the project, the timeline makes key milestones easy to see, the stakeholder section shows who is responsible for what, and the scope columns make the project boundaries easier to understand at a glance. The more detailed information can still stay in the project plan and other supporting documents.
It’s still a charter, but it doesn’t look like a legal-sized paper document. See the template below:
If you are managing web or app projects and would like to get the ready version (based on an example of a sample eCommerce checkout redesign; you can see how you can actually apply it before you start investing your time into any project), here’s your link:
When I Would Use a One-Page Visual Charter
I would use this particular charter when I need to present the general overview of the project to stakeholders in order to align them on the main points at the very beginning of the work. This tool helps to create a common understanding of the product among the founders, product owners, business stakeholders, and engineering leads, who might see the same project from different perspectives.
I would not use this type of visual charter instead of all the other project-related documents since, in some cases, a detailed description of a project plan, risk register, requirements, delivery roadmap, or specification might be required by the stakeholders. In this case, a visual charter is meant to provide a general overview, while the specific details can be covered separately.
I would apply the one-page document for a software or web project in order to outline the objective of the work, project highlights, key stakeholders, project scope, and risks before detailed planning and design activities commence.
Related articles on the same topic of visual reporting:
- 9 Slides Your Weekly Status Report Template Needs to Impress Founders
- 7 Sprint Planning Templates That Save Web & App Teams From Chaos
Quick Self-Check ✅
Before sending out your next charter, ask yourself the following questions:
- Is the objective easily found and understandable within the first 5 seconds?
- Is the milestone’s timeline visually apparent?
- Does your risk section contain colors besides adjectives?
- Can a new stakeholder skim your document and understand what is expected of them at a glance?
- Is the scope a bulleted list or a run-on paragraph?
If you answered “no” to more than one, the format is probably working against you, not the content itself.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Is a visual charter still considered a “real” or formal project charter?
Yes, nothing about a visual charter eliminates required content like the project objective, scope, stakeholders, risks, or timeline. This just presents the same information in a more easily digested visual format.
Does this apply to software/web projects only?
While I’ve designed it with web and software development teams in mind (as that’s my specialty), the same general structure applies to any type of project. The objective, milestones, scope, stakeholders, and risks can be applied to any project regardless of industry or methodology. The only difference would be the contents of the work plan section.
Do we already have a mandated charter template?
If you’re currently using a specific template that’s mandated by the company, this is perfectly fine. The goal of this document is to provide a one-page visual summary that can be used for presentation to stakeholders, while more detailed information can be kept/presented in the mandated format.
Is this a project plan or status report?
No to both. A project charter is a document created at the beginning of a project to kick it off and get buy-in from stakeholders. It covers the objectives and high-level plan for the project. A status report (see my article on weekly status reports) is a recurring report for stakeholders that shows them where the project is at any given point. The charter and status report are two separate but related documents
Final Thought
A charter’s only purpose is to get everyone on the same page before work begins. It can’t do that if it isn’t read. So, it doesn’t matter how good a charter is if nobody reads it.
Visual format is not intended to make the charter attractive but to ensure that a busy stakeholder can find the needed information in the limited time s/he has for reviewing the document.
