A Project Charter is a foundational document that formally authorizes a project, outlining its objectives, stakeholders, and scope. Creating one from scratch can be time-consuming. We can use AI, along with a past successful charter, to generate a high-quality draft in minutes.

The Strategy: Example-Based Prompting

The goal is to provide the AI with a template of what "good" looks like. By giving it a successful charter from a previous project, we guide its structure, tone, and level of detail.

Step 1: Anonymize Your Example Charter Take a project charter from a past project that was well-received. Open it in a text editor and remove or replace all sensitive information:

• Project names (e.g., change "Project Titan" to "[PREVIOUS_PROJECT_NAME]")
• Stakeholder names
• Specific dates and budget numbers

Step 2: Craft Your Prompt Now, construct a prompt that uses your anonymized charter as an example.

Example Prompt:

"Act as a senior Program Manager at a tech company. Your task is to draft a formal Project Charter for a new project.

New Project Context:

• Project Name: "Global Checkout Rollout"
• Goal: To deploy our new, unified checkout system across all our European websites.
• Timeline: 3 months
• Key Stakeholders: Head of Engineering, Director of Product (Europe), Head of Legal.

Please use the structure, tone, and level of detail from the example charter provided below to create the new one.

---

EXAMPLE CHARTER:

[Paste your anonymized charter text here] ---"

Why This Works

The AI will not just copy the old charter. It will recognize the sections like 'Problem Statement', 'Objectives', 'Scope', 'Stakeholders', and 'Budget' and use them as a template. It will then populate these sections with new content relevant to the "Global Checkout Rollout" project, while maintaining the professional tone and formatting from your example.

This approach ensures the output is not only fast but also aligned with your organization's standards, making it an immediately useful document that you can paste into Microsoft Word for final refinement.