Q: We don't use the term charter in our projects. We call it a Project Description Document or sometimes a statement of work. How do you explain this?
A: It doesn't matter what you call it, nor is the specific form that important. What is important, however, is to understand that a charter and what the PMBOK now describes as a preliminary scope statement should be used to gain high level consensus on scope and objectives before planning begins. A longer project description document or statement of work (what the PMBOK calls scope statement) might then be required after the project has been approved for planning.

Q: But one or two pages don't describe much. What good is that?
A: A famous writer once apologized in a letter that he didn't have time to write a short letter so he wrote a long one. Sound thinking often produces fewer words but those few words can be very powerful. In our age of attention-deficit many people balk at reading more than a page or two.

Q: You don't know my organization. I'm never going to get my sponsor to "issue" a charter.
A: When the PMBOK Third Edition discussion draft came out, we brought to the PMBOK committee precisely this point and strongly suggested that the international book of standards ought to represent reality not fantasy. The PMBOK committee rejected our proposed change and we had to creep back to our den and contemplate while licking our wounds. What if the book of international project management standards said "Yes, Project Managers, it's alright if your sponsor can't take half an hour to discuss your project with you when they assign it to you. You can figure it out". Or how about this one? "They're really not that interested in the project to spend an hour doing some hard thinking about what they want, but, because you are a PMP, you can get inside their mind and do their thinking for them." We need to learn strategies for asking the right questions while walking down the hallway before lunch with our sponsor so when we block them from leaving their cubicle at the end of the day the conversation only takes fifteen minutes.