How to generate a team charter

A team charter is a tool that enables you to

• Keep your team on track towards team or project goals
• Inform people who are not a part of the team what the team is all about
• Communicate with Sponsors and Stakeholders
• Set norms of behavior for teammates
• Get new team members up to speed quickly

With so many good reasons to create a charter, why would you not have one? Well, there are several common reasons that go beyond a team not having experience with charters. They include

• The concern that a charter will not be kept up to date
• Prioritization of the charter below other work due to the effort required
• The lack of a simple form and examples

And the list goes on.

MetaTeam can help you deliver a management-ready charter to your teammates, sponsors and stakeholders. Creating a basic charter is easy, and if you are willing to follow simple guidelines you will get even more out of the charter generation feature.

Here is an example charter generated by MetaTeam. Your charter will look similar, but of course not be exactly the same.

To create a charter all you need to do is go to your team's Charter Tab and click either the PDF or Word link at the upper right hand side. The icons are right beside the help icon.

Clicking the PDF icon creates and loads the charter into a new page using Acrobat. The Word icon opens an HTML version that you can save and open in Word for editing. (Keep in mind that if you edit the generated charter your edits do not go back into MetaTeam automatically).

Charter Statements

MetaTeam charters include information from the Members, Roles, Goals, Decisions and Charter tabs. Much of the text for the charter comes from the Charter Statements you add to the Charter tab. It is these statements that you must "tag" correctly in order that they show in your generated charter.

Your generated charter displays statements that have the following types:

• Overview
• Background
• Scope
• Risk
• Constraint
• Issue
• Assumption
• Stakeholder

If you do not add statements with these types you will not have the corresponding section in your generated charter.

Customizing

You may customize how your charters are generated. Customizing how charters are generated requires a person who knows XSLT. Charters are created by serializing your team to XML, generating an HTML page and converting the HTML page to PDF. To make changes you need to look at the import/export XML Schema and the XSLT stylesheets and modify the stylesheets to suit your needs. Suffice to say, this is not a simple task, but if you know XSLT it is straightforward.

You can find the XSLTs in your install directory in the config/xslt/team/charter directory.

If you need assistance customizing your XSLTs you may contact eVisioner to ask about the doability of what you want and request a quote for your customization.