| name | program-charter |
| description | Turn a fuzzy cross-team mandate into a chartered program — a measurable outcome, a named sponsor, explicit in/out-of-scope boundaries, the teams on the hook, and the starting RAID. Use at the very start, before any planning, whenever a multi-team effort lacks a clear outcome or owner. |
Skill: Program charter
Charter a program before planning it. A program without a measurable outcome and a
named sponsor is a request, not a program — and it cannot be declared done.
When to use
- A multi-team effort has been handed down but the outcome is fuzzy.
- Several teams share a deadline but no one owns the joint result.
- A program is in flight but nobody can state, in one sentence, what "done" means.
First confirm this is actually a program (tree 1 in
../../knowledge/tpm-engagement-decision-trees.md).
If the hard part isn't cross-team seams, route to project-management.
Procedure
- Write the outcome as one measurable sentence. Metric + target + date. If you
can't measure it, you can't close it. Push back on "improve X" until it's
"move metric M from A to B by date D."
- Name the single sponsor. One accountable executive who funds tradeoffs and
breaks ties. Two sponsors is zero sponsors.
- Draw the scope boundary — out-of-scope first. The out list is what protects
the date; make it explicit and get the sponsor to agree it.
- List the teams and each team's one deliverable into the program.
- Seed the RAID with the known risks, assumptions, issues, and the obvious
cross-team dependencies.
- Fill the
program-charter template and
get the sponsor's explicit sign-off before any planning starts.
Output
A completed charter. The outcome sentence is the contract; everything downstream
(plan, RAID, status, go/no-go) is judged against it.
Anti-patterns (the hook flags these in artifacts)
- A charter with no measurable outcome ("improve billing").
- A charter with no named sponsor, or two co-sponsors.
- A scope section with an in-list but no out-list.
