program-charter

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

1. 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."
2. Name the single sponsor. One accountable executive who funds tradeoffs and breaks ties. Two sponsors is zero sponsors.
3. 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.
4. List the teams and each team's one deliverable into the program.
5. Seed the RAID with the known risks, assumptions, issues, and the obvious cross-team dependencies.
6. 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.