The Project Charter is a document containing key information regarding the IT project. The Project Charter forms the basis for managing the project and serves as a point of reference for those involved in the project. There are two fundamentally different forms of this document, the first and more commonly encountered being the Project Charter created before the project's implementation, e.g., based on the Prince2 methodology template. This template includes areas such as:

• Project description: A brief description of the project's goals, its significance to the organization, and main assumptions.
• Project objectives: Specific goals that are to be achieved within the project.
• Project scope: A precise definition of what is included in the project and what is not, to avoid misunderstandings and changes in scope during implementation.
• Project schedule: Start and end dates, as well as key project milestones.
• Project resources: Identification of resources necessary for the project's realization, including human, financial, and technical resources.
• Project risks: Identification of potential threats and uncertainties that may affect the project's realization, and strategies for their management.
• Stakeholders: A list of interested parties, i.e., individuals or groups whose interests may be affected by the project, along with their roles and expectations.

The Project Charter in this format is primarily intended for managers dealing with the project from the client's side. From the contractor's side, however, such a Project Charter template, while still important, is less useful. More important, especially in developmental projects, may be other information that arises during the project's implementation. For this reason, in addition to the above-described Project Charter template developed by the client, our organization also maintains an internal document that supplements the Project Charter with other information significant from our perspective.

In our version, the Project Charter document includes:

1. Internal project resources, including: the name of the manager, current team composition. This point should also include team members who have been involved in the project in the past but have been transferred to other projects, so that they can be more easily contacted in the future if needed.
2. Contacts to the client, including all key persons involved in the project, but mainly from a substantive perspective. In this point in our Project Charter, primarily decision-makers and designated contacts for issues related to business logic functioning are important.
3. Regular meeting schedule, along with a brief note about the purpose of the meeting and the person leading the meeting. This point is particularly important for minimizing the risk of the manager's sudden absence.
4. Regular collaboration path with the client - this point includes brief information about routine processes in the project, such as: task acceptance process and their reception, billing process, etc.
5. Useful links including:

• addresses of test/stage/prod environments
• addresses to the GIT code repository
• addresses to devops systems
• addresses to test support systems, e.g., TestLink
• instructions for configuration and startup of developer systems
• links to project documentation

6. and all other key information in the project.

The main goal of our Project Charter is, therefore, to gather in one place all key data about the project. This information should support processes such as: onboarding new employees, serving as a knowledge base in case of the absence of an important team member, collecting basic information to facilitate the audit of a given project, and especially serving as a central point collecting all project information, which may be scattered across different systems used in the company. It is worth adding that the Project Charter plays a significant role in maintaining knowledge in the Managerial substitution procedures. A properly developed Project Charter greatly facilitates finding important project information and supports knowledge transfer processes.