Coaching Blog Contacts
My report Start now →
← Secret 10
10,1 The Project Charter 10,2 Power and Struggle 10,3 Large Group Process
Not read

Lesson 10,1 · Relations / Team Roles · Focus — The Project Charter

The Project Charter

Choose the right leader for the right project, the coach for your manager, and a team that complements the project manager. The charter is the road the project travels: business goals and scope at one end, customer satisfaction and TQM at the other.

Personal
Heart language · SGL speaks especially to mission-driven leaders and organisations — those who want to connect values and purpose more closely with everyday leadership in projects.

The Project Charter road — a winding path through six numbered stops, from Creating the Project Charter through Working as a Team, Developing the Project Plan and Doing the Project, to Closing Out the Project
Six stops. Read and learn the road before you decide which one is yours.

Choose your quality of being

  • Choose the right leader for the right project.
  • Choose the coach for your manager and project.
  • Choose a team that complements the project manager.
Four chess pieces standing in a row on a board — a dark bishop, a light knight, a dark rook, and a light pawn
Rook, Bishop, Knight, Pawn — the four chess roles behind every project team.

The Project Charter

  1. 1Creating the Project Charter. Business goals, and the “big picture” scope defined. Estimate the project’s limits drawn.
  2. 2Brainstorming. Fantasies and dreams seeking solutions for the vision and the best possible concept.
  3. 3Elect the team members. Team members’ commitments clarified. Prepare SGL guidelines for the winner team.
  4. 4Development of the Project Plan. Details added to the project scope. Project boundaries determined. Schedule, budget and staffing estimates adjusted. Risk factors and countermeasures defined.
  5. 5Doing the Project. Project progress monitored. Consider whether to change manager.
  6. 6Closing Out the Project. Customer satisfaction evaluated. Learning captured — TQM.

Read and learn the charter. Become aware of which phase you are naturally best at.

Pick the one stop on the road where you do your best work — this saves to your report, and nowhere else.

Where do you sit best on the Project Charter road?

SGL in project

SGL is designed for projects, with its vast experience and knowledge of group formation, group development, team expectations and project assignments from beginning to handover. The hallmark of the project is always a clear start and an agreed handover, at an estimated price and a specific quality standard. This means the project organisation must continuously change in relation to the task at hand, while progress, costs and quality requirements are maintained.

This requires a high degree of delegation, cooperation and personal involvement in each other’s areas of responsibility. To reach such goals, high professional competence, good chemistry, proper communication and mutual trust relationships are required. Such cultures do not arise by themselves, because you gather eight or ten skilled professionals in the same place at the same time and pay them to deliver the best possible results. It all requires a process, and a leader who understands the game step by step — or who collaborates with a facilitator or a coach with sufficient authority. SGL has done this many times, and shares some of that experience below.

Grane — our best delivery

The Grane project received the year’s award for best delivery, quality and leadership, with SGL-coaching at all levels from beginning to end. Here is our story about the communication and the objectives.

The Granefeltet is an oil field about 185 kilometres west of Haugesund. It was discovered by Norsk Hydro in 1991, and production started on 23 September 2003 — the first field on the Norwegian continental shelf to produce heavy crude oil. It was developed with the Grane platform, standing at a depth of 127 metres, designed by Aker Solutions Engineering between 2000 and 2003. The project manager was Per Melsom, T&U / Norsk Hydro.

SGL was involved throughout, with responsibility for coaching and the project’s internal management development from the very beginning to the end. At the close of the year, Grane was named and honoured “Project of the Year” — for time and delivery, for costs, and for quality and TQM.

Eight men in orange work clothes and white hard hats standing close together on a quayside in the mist, with a tall steel platform module rising behind them
The Grane team at the construction yard. Coaching ran at every level, from the very beginning to the end.

Good projects begin with the joy of creation, and end with pride

For people and projects who want a lot: start with our AI agent JP, to build a common language.

Let the SGL agent JP prepare the ground. By creating a shared language and a common understanding of essential concepts, the team reaches the starting line together. From there, the real work begins. Using the tool themselves, the team strengthens its interaction, sharpens its competence, and grows into the best possible version of itself. Growth begins with focus on shared understanding and goals. A search for deeper insight and stronger relationships sets a new cycle in motion. When people share values, language, and understanding, and the need for deeper insight and competence development, strengths unfold and expectations rise. Step by step, the circle lifts individuals and teams to a new level of quality and being.

Anyone who has ever experienced success will hunger for new success — only at an even higher level.

Improvement and human need

According to the SGL concept

“Every wish for improvement begins in the individual’s self-understanding. It can be misleading to say that a ‘group’ wants development — it is the needs of individuals that shape and legitimise every organisation. No external change will succeed without a corresponding change at the personal level. When this is ignored, resistance will arise, and change will quietly be sabotaged. A shift from one need-based structure to another is impossible until the needs of the previous level have been satisfied.”

But more about power struggle in project groups in Secret 10,2 — Power and Struggle.

Your turn

An open notebook and two sharpened pencils on a dark desk under the pool of light from a lamp, the page still blank
The exercise wants a pen and paper, not a keyboard.

Homework 10,1 — Choose the project leader

Every project phase requires special characteristics. The four chess roles — Rook, Bishop, Knight and Pawn — have different functional strengths.

Who is best suited to be project manager in a project you know well, according to the Project Charter? Justify why.

SGL Secrets — For those who are in need, and those who want a lot!

Next lesson

Lesson 10,2: Power and Struggle

Continue to 10,2 →