A charter that commits somebody
Thirteen sections, checked for the things that make a charter useless: no exclusions, unmeasurable success criteria, and sections short enough that nobody could disagree with them.
A charter that commits somebody to something
Nothing here is generated. A blank section is reported as blank, because invented text ends a conversation that needed to happen.
What is checked
Required sections must have content. Very short sections are flagged, since a section nobody could disagree with usually says nothing.
Success criteria are checked for numbers or dates. "Improved", "streamlined" and "better" cannot be assessed at the end, which is the only moment that section exists for.
An empty out-of-scope section is warned about specifically. A project with no stated exclusions has implicitly agreed to everything anyone later assumes.
No text is ever generated. This validates what you wrote and tells you what is missing.
Out of scope is the most valuable section
It is also the one most often skipped, because writing it requires saying no to something specific while everyone is still enthusiastic.
Every exclusion you write down is an argument you do not have in month four. A charter that lists ten deliverables and nothing excluded has quietly agreed to whatever anyone assumed was included.
Measurable means numbers or dates
"Improve customer experience" is a direction, not a criterion. At the end nobody can say whether it happened, so the project cannot be judged and the next one learns nothing.
"Reduce average handling time from 6 minutes to 4 by 31 March" can be assessed by anyone, including people who were not there. That is the entire purpose of writing it down.
The charter is a record, not a formality
Its value is that it captures what people agreed at the point they agreed it, before memory drifts. That only works if the words were argued over — a charter assembled from templates and generated filler records nothing and predicts nothing.