The project charter is a document that officially starts a project. It formally authorizes the existence of the project and provides a reference source for the future. The charter provides direction and a sense of purpose to the management from start to end.
As a team, the Sponsor, Team Leader, Physician Leader, and QI coach will complete each section of the project charter prior to the Project Handoff meeting. After the Project Handoff meeting, the Sponsor will take a step back, leaving the team with clearly defined project parameters.
The project charter contains the following sections:
Overview
This section contains the project title, global aim, and measure. If you are participating in an improvement collaborative, this section will be pre-populated.
| Project Title | Official project name which briefly describes what you are improving. Improvement collaborative: a brief summary of the collaborative focus and your organization name. |
| Global Aim | What is the business use case or motivating reason the team is committed to solving the problem? Improvement collaborative: what is the focus of the collaborative? |
| Measure | The measure that accurately reflects the process you are trying to improve. Improvement collaborative: collaborative defined measure |
Description of the Problem
This section contains the problem statement, goal, and scope. If you are participating in an improvement collaborative, the problem statement will be pre-populated.
| Problem Statement | Your understanding of what is problematic about the current state. What/where/when is the problem? What is happening that shouldn’t be? Improvement collaborative: collaborative consensus statement of the problem. |
| Goal | How will you know the project succeeded? Improvement collaborative: increase collaborative measure performance from baseline to target by end of project cohort. |
| Scope | Briefly describe the elements that are in and out of scope for the project. What are the boundaries? |
Project Team
This section identifies the personnel who will fill each of the defined project roles. The Sponsor is agreeing to protect the time for these individuals to partake in the educational components of the ImPower program and perform the project work.
Project and Time Management
This section identifies: date and time of weekly team meetings, team communications and document storage, and identifying ownership for creating meeting agendas and taking notes, updating the A3, and updating the run chart.