A team charter is one of the most effective ways to increase collaboration and teamwork in a project, business, or company. When you appropriately create such a document, you can motivate and encourage your team members to work as one entity.
Documenting the roles and responsibilities of the project team and regular review has become the need of the hour. That is because industries and businesses are changing at an unprecedented speed. Companies have started implementing team charters and their templates to keep up with the needs of the digital age.
Want to know more about team charters? Continue reading this article to find an in-depth discussion on the topic, its objectives, benefits, drafting, and free templates to guide you in real-life situations.
What Is a Team Charter?
To define a project team’s assets, obstacles, and goals, project owners or managers use the team charter document. Sometimes, such a charter may also outline the boundaries and direction of the team. In a nutshell, it is highly similar to product or project roadmaps, except the charter of a team is only for an individual team.
The project’s team charter should unambiguously define the responsibilities and roles of every member of the team. It emphasizes its focus on team members’ deliverables and how to draw out a plan for deliveries over some time. Furthermore, it ensures a smooth team engagement over the long term and during significant transitions in the project or business.
The higher management, their subordinates, project leads, and project team members should reach a consensus before setting up the team charter. It is supposed to mitigate confusion about the team’s role in the business process or project.
Objectives of Creating a Team Charter
Project team members’ charter is an indispensable part of the broader project resource planning process. You should draft the document with the following objectives in mind:
- First off, define the project’s outcome in which the team will be working in the form of results. These results could be services, products, or simple deliverables.
- Next, you need to set roles for the team members based on individual project outcomes. For example, assigning a front-end developer, back-end developer, designer, tester, and marketer for an app development project.
- The third element is to define the responsibilities based on the roles. Include appropriate clauses to ensure required responsibility amendment when the project demands it.
- You also need to set up a proper relationship channel from the bottom level to the top level of the project. It will ensure an appropriate chain of command for reporting tasks, bugs, and deliverables.
- Finally, there should be a set of ground rules in line with the business’s acceptable behavior policy.
Benefits of Using a Team Charter
Here are the advantages that you can expect from a team members’ charter:
- If your business staff are afraid of new transformations, a team charter can help them get on board since it functions as a how-to guide.
- It also helps the team or project lead set accountability across the teams to ensure employees automatically pick their tasks.
- Team charters include detailed responsibilities and roles of all the team members. Thus, resources do not waste time guessing their tasks within the project.
- Business stakeholders and project owners will know the team’s purpose. It will enable the higher management to take strategic decisions of increasing or decreasing the team strength.
- Team charters also help project managers resolve conflicts when multiple teams actively work on a single project.
Important Attributes of a Team Charter
Attributes of team charters will change from project to project. But, the following ten features are somewhat common:
- Team objectives and mission
- Background of the project
- Mention of budget, training, and resources
- An operational structure of the team
- Roles and responsibilities of team members
- Metrics for team performance assessment
- An outline of project scope and team participation
- A communication guide to set team meeting policy
- A list of project tasks and milestones
- Signatures of all the team members
After including the above attributes, you can use your imagination and creativity to enhance the team charter.
Creating a Team Charter: Step-By-Step Guide
Authoring team members’ charter is enjoyable and effortless when you use a good template. You should also prefer collaborative drafting of the document instead of allowing one person to work on it. Here’s how you can create one for your own project or business:
#1. Begin with a context of the charter like identifying stakeholder’s expectations, team members’ contributing capacity, personal expectations, and the team leader.
#2. Pass on the questions to all the members and have them write their own answers.
#3. Now, it is time to draft a mission statement for the team charter. You can start by gathering info on success targets, goals to be reached, value-added work to support the team, etc.
#4. The next step is to create milestones, goals, and deadlines related to the project’s mission statement. Here, you can explain the roles, responsibilities, and mentors. Additionally, you could mention:
- Who will report to whom
- The person to assess individual performance
- Who gets the duty to communicate with the higher authority
#5. Then, you need to create a detailed outline for the performance assessment. You need to set up metrics, assessment intervals, mode of evaluation, and a format for scoring.
#6. Once you have finalized the above content, move on to physically printing the document for sharing. You can also digitally circulate the draft charter. Irrespective of the mode of sharing, you need to get an acknowledgment from each team member.
Here are some best free team charter template suggestions to create top-quality team charters for professional needs:
Mural
Mural is a popular whiteboard tool that enables the collaborative creation of team charters. If you use the team charter template of this collaboration tool, you can effortlessly outline the vital elements of team connection and communication. You should also be able to specify a set of skills and concepts that will guide your team in the future.
There are two different versions of the Mural team charter template. One is an example of a completed team charter, and another is the blank design of the same document. Once you finish creating the document through collaboration, export it in different forms like PDF, PNG, and zipped HTML with data.
Miro
Miro is yet another successful online collaboration board for remote and hybrid teams. It also comes with several free templates for team charter that you can customize effortlessly. Furthermore, you can share the online template link with your entire team for collaborative work on a company or project team charter.
Miro also outlines complete instructions to edit its free templates like team charter for a sales or an academic team on its template portal. You can sign up for free using your Google account and get started to personalize the example document as per your project. If you need to export the document, you can save it as an image, PDF, or Miro template.
Creately
Creately is a globally acclaimed visual workspace for creating flowcharts, diagrams, infographics, and team charters. It has an extensive library of templates for various business documents, including charters for project teams. Thus, you can choose the one that meets your business or project requirement and edit it.
However, Creately offers a limited number of templates of team charters for free users. You can either choose a three-by-three or a two-by-three-by-two format. The available templates from Creatly are suitable for lightweight and focused team charter documents. Speaking of exporting, it offers PDF, JPEG, CSV, PNG, and SVG formats.
DocFormats
DocFormats is a top-rated and reliable portal for business document templates like event proposals, employee evaluations, marketing brochures, etc. You will also find some professional team charter example documents on this website. There are more than 10 team charter templates on DocFormats.
Its library includes project, healthcare, agile development, column-type, and visual team charters. You can download the RTF and Word files from the portal. Then, you can edit the document as per your requirements.
Sample.net
You may have visited Sample.net for its high-quality and trusted content of business, sales, and marketing documents. This time, we encourage you to visit again so that you can get more than 50 business-ready team charter templates.
It offers a variety of example documents for team charters on group assignments, team boundaries, teamwork, grading rubric, graphic design, management action plan, executive leadership, and many more.
The template documents are in different file types. You can click on one template to get a sneak peek of the downloadable file type. Most of the downloads are available in PDF formats, so you will need a PDF editor tool to customize the templates.
Final Thoughts
This article should work as your go-to reference for team charters and their templates whenever you need to create one for your project or business. You can also follow the step-by-step guide to creating a team charter mentioned above.
Moreover, the article also introduces you to 5 popular and best team charter templates that you can use for free in relevant projects and business operations.
Just authoring an actionable team charter is not the end of your responsibilities. You must share it appropriately with the team and project owners. Also, you will need to keep the document safe from prying eyes in the cyber world. Therefore, you should use any document management software for effortless content administration.
