Before the curtain rises in an opera, before the first bar sounds or a tenor lays his heart bare on an open stage, something magical happens: the overture. It is not just musical small talk – it is promise, warning and prophecy in one. It tells us whether we are in for a tragedy or a comedy. Whether the orchestra will cheer – or weep. And it does all of this before a single character has set foot on the stage.
That is exactly what the project charter is. And yes, I know: charter sounds like a form, like a box to tick, like the document you fill in because the process manual says so, and which then quietly rots in a SharePoint folder no one ever opens again. I thought that way for a long time myself. Until I took over a project that had no charter – only one sentence in an email: “Let’s just do this one agile.” Four months and three escalation meetings later, nobody still knew what exactly this was. Never again without one.
Grand Opera Opens with Grand Sounds
Take Wagner’s Rheingold – and I mean: really take it, sit down inside it, ideally in Bayreuth, where the seats are about as comfortable as nineteenth-century tavern stools, which they probably are. It begins with a single E-flat major chord. One note. It grows. For a hundred and thirty-six bars, layer upon layer, until the whole orchestra vibrates – and not a single word has been spoken. Wagner was many things; modest was not one of them. But he understood something that some project leaders never learn in twenty years: anyone planning a four-part epic about power, greed and ruin had better make clear in the prelude which forces are at work.
Or Carmen – the opera practically everyone knows, even people who insist opera isn’t for them. Bizet’s overture throws everything onto the table in three minutes: the joy of life and the foreboding of death, as if someone had tossed a county fair and a requiem into a blender. That is wildly exaggerated, of course. But that is exactly the point. After the overture, everyone in the hall has understood: here we will love, suffer and die, and in that order.
The principle behind it is so simple it is almost easy to miss. Anyone who wants to lead – an orchestra or a project team – has to make clear at the outset which piece is being played. Not in detail. But in the right key.
No Libretto, No Drama – No Vision, No Project
Nobody stages Verdi’s Aida by simply throwing up some pyramids and hoping somebody starts singing. Although – I have seen productions where I wasn’t entirely sure. It takes a libretto: a story, a conflict, an arc.
In projects I see it with charming regularity: teams throw themselves at user stories in Sprint One without ever having answered the one question that carries everything else – why are we doing this, and what should be different at the end than it was before? The vision in the charter is the leitmotif that runs through every act. By it you can tell whether the ensemble is still playing the same piece – or has long since started improvising.
What makes a good vision: it inspires, but it stays tangible. And whoever knows what they are working toward through the hard stretches will hold on. Whoever doesn’t updates their LinkedIn status.
The Charter – Our Opening Chord in E-flat
Into the spotlight: the project charter. Our first chord – but with structure and stance. Not a sentence on a form, but the document that turns a project into a project in the first place. I say that with the emphasis of someone who has seen too many initiatives start as projects and end as permanent construction sites.
Project goals are the libretto of the charter. I once read a goal that went: “Improve customer satisfaction sustainably.” That is not a goal. That is a horoscope. A goal would be: cut the handling time for customer inquiries from forty-eight hours to twenty-four by Q3. The difference? It is the difference between “we’ll play something nice” and “we’ll play the Walküre, second act, at Karajan’s 1967 tempo.”
Just as important: the parties and stakeholders. In opera, everyone knows who sings, who conducts and who is sitting in the stalls. In projects this is astonishingly often unclear. Because the stakeholder you don’t know is the one who shows up three weeks before go-live and wants everything different. The charter names them early: who is the soloist, who stands in the chorus, and who sits in the prompter’s box.
Then the scope and its limits. In opera, nobody would decide mid-performance to quickly squeeze in a ballet. In projects that happens exactly – constantly, and usually with the words: “Couldn’t we also just quickly …” The charter draws the line. Gently, but clearly.
And the resources: who pays the fees, and is there enough left for a chorus – or will it be a solo evening with piano accompaniment? I hold an almost superstitious conviction: projects whose budget is unclear at approval never come in under budget. Never.
Success Criteria — or: When Does the Audience Applaud?
Now to the heart of it, the part missing from an alarming number of charters. In opera, success is immediate: shouts of bravo – or the worst of all operatic moments – a few scattered coughs after the final chord. In projects, that resonant space is missing. Which is why you need criteria defined in advance.
I stress the in advance, because the alternative comes up depressingly often: a project wraps up, development celebrates, sales complains, and without defined criteria, project success becomes a matter of opinion. And a matter of opinion is the opposite of control.
Good success criteria need two categories. Hard, measurable ones – the equivalent of the ticket sold. And soft, qualitative ones – the equivalent of the opening-night review. Both have to be in place before the start. A director who only decides after the premiere how he measures success will always find reasons to talk everything up.
No Sheet Music for Every Voice — but the Key for the Whole
The charter does not dictate when the oboe comes in. Anyone who expects that has mistaken the overture for the score. The charter sets the key: minor or major, chamber opera or full staging.
Anyone who has been to the opera knows: directors and singers can argue for hours over whether the dagger is drawn from the right or the left. But they argue within a frame. Without that frame, every rehearsal is a guessing game — and every sprint a flight in the dark.
No Overture Without an Echo
A good project charter is not a dusty prompt book that vanishes into a drawer. It is the first chord that carries the whole evening.
And when it is truly well made – when the libretto holds, the roles are cast and the success criteria stand – then, after the last bar, you feel that brief moment of silence that exists only in opera, before the applause breaks loose. The moment in which everyone knows: that was no accident. That was planned, rehearsed, and brought to the stage together.
Curtain up on the next one.