project-charter-and-baseline

Skill: project-charter-and-baseline

Purpose: Produce the defensible baseline a predictive project is measured against — charter first, then scope + WBS, then the baseline. Used by delivery-lead.

When to use

• Project initiation (before any schedule exists).
• A reset / re-baseline after a major change.
• Before the first earned-value status (you can't measure against a baseline you don't have).

The procedure

1. Charter before plan. Capture: the objective, measurable success criteria, the sponsor (one named person), high-level scope (in / out), and the assumptions + constraints. No schedule until this is agreed — a Gantt without a charter is a guess with a date.
2. Scope statement → WBS. Decompose the in-scope work to the work-package level. Each package: a deliverable, a single named owner, and an estimate basis. Deliverable-oriented, not activity-soup.
3. Estimate + sequence. Size each package (state the basis — analogous / parametric / three-point), identify dependencies, and find the critical path (name the path + its float — a slip there costs the project, not a buffer).
4. Baseline. Lock scope + schedule + cost as the baseline of record. From here, every change is a change request with an impact analysis (see the change-request template), not a silent edit.
5. Choose predictive deliberately. If the work is high-uncertainty / discovery-heavy, say so and route to the agile track (the delivery-approach decision tree) rather than forcing a baseline onto chaos.

Anti-patterns this skill prevents

• A schedule with no charter / agreed success criteria behind it.
• WBS items owned by "the team"; packages with no estimate basis.
• A baseline you never actually locked (so "change" means nothing).
• A predictive plan forced onto genuinely exploratory work (should be agile/hybrid).

Output

A charter + scope/WBS + baseline (see ../../templates/project-charter.md). Changes thereafter route through ../../templates/change-request.md. End with the delivery-lead Output Contract block; hand risk-register population to risk-and-raid-analyst and stakeholder packaging to stakeholder-comms-lead.