Projects plow (or plod) ahead just fine, especially when there is something that is believed to approximate a charter, like a project or work initiation document, a sensible budget spreadsheet, or a darn good powerpoint presentation. What could possibly go wrong when a group of managing directors get together to approve a large project on the back of a budget and a presentation? Probably little will go wrong that day.

Imagine an IT project that burns through most of a 9-digit budget in about 18 months only to find that the completed product could not be used by its intended users. Imagine the rest of the budget and roughly another six months were then spent adding essential functionality. Imagine the finished product was ultimately used by a single person, whose job it was to export the data to Excel every day for all the other users.

One thing that project managers are constantly being tempted to do is to unilaterally move (or re-interpret) the project objectives, boundary, committed resources and authorizing players (as described by III in his chartering article). When these are not agreed before the start of the project or do not have to be reviewed during its execution, there is always the risk that work will conveniently be moved out of the project.

In the above example, a more junior manager working on smaller projects for the same business spotted the project objectives changing (and the consequences) about 12 months in. When the senior PM was offered evidence that his project would no longer meet the needs of the business, he confidently defended the project on the grounds that it had the blessing of 11 managing directors and that all was well.

Information is never perfect or complete, so I would reinforce that the project charter needs to be continuously validated and consciously lived up to. For example, the end of an iteration or a release should highlight its contributions to the charter objectives; a prototype demo should produce minutes with feedback from the authorizing players; status reporting should include the realized value that the work so far has delivered, as well as the amount of unrealized value that has been accumulated (and is therefore at risk) - all in the context of the charter.