1999 International Student Paper Award Winner: Evaluation and Application of a Project Charter Template to Improve the Project Planning Process

Innovation and project management formation are best accomplished in the early stage of a project. The project charter is important to the success of a project, transforming agreements and facts into a documented project management approach. This output begins to organize and document a project's need and expected outcomes at the beginning of the project management process and provides a foundation on which to base project decisions. This paper evaluates the completeness and effectiveness of a project charter template as a project management tool. In addition, a project charter is developed for an information system development project initiated by a hospital-based clinical laboratory, addressing the problem of a complete lack of a repeatable project management process within an entity whose adaptation of formal project management methods is immature. A section-by-section assessment of the justification for inclusion in the Tryon and Associates Project Charter (Tryon and Associates, 1998) adopted by St. John Medical Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma USA, based upon a review of project management literature, is accomplished. In addition, a working project charter for use in the planning phase of one of Regional Medical Laboratory's (RML) current information system development projects—RML Turnaround Time System—is constructed and evaluated. This study of project charter components, combined with the development of a formal planning document for an authentic project in progress, provides an opportunity to introduce, validate, and integrate the concept of a formalized project initiation process.