Create a detailed, integrated project charter to address a healthcare gap, need, or improvement at your practicum site.

Introduction

In NHS-FPX8040, you prepared a preliminary project charter. At that time, you may not have secured your practicum site or preceptor yet. Now that these are in place, in this course you will delve more deeply into creating a project charter appropriate for your practicum site’s needs. You may be able to use some of the project charter work you did in the previous course. At the same time, you may find you need to completely retool your work as it may no longer be appropriate for your practicum site. This is the changing nature of doctoral projects.  As we learn more information, doctoral projects change. Your ability to manage this ambiguity and change will be critical to your successfully completing your doctoral program.

In this assessment, you will create a detailed, integrated project charter to address a healthcare gap, need, or improvement at your practicum site. You will need to obtain input from your practicum site about how you can help to meet their needs. After submitting your project charter, you will receive your faculty member’s feedback on your charter’s alignment with department objectives, academic rigor, coherency, and readiness for Institutional Review Board (IRB) submission.

Demonstration of Proficiency

By successfully completing this assessment, you will demonstrate your proficiency in the course competencies through the following assessment scoring guide criteria:

• Competency 1: Create a project charter to address a clinical or organizational problem or take advantage of an opportunity for improvement within a health care setting.
  • Clearly describe the people who will be involved in and affected by a project.
  • Clearly describe an overview of all aspects of a project plan.
  • Clearly describe the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats related to a project plan.
  • Clearly describe the ethical considerations, constraints, external dependencies, and communication strategy of a project plan.
  • Clearly describe the outcome measures related to a project plan.
  • Clearly describe the data collection procedures related to a project plan.
  • Describe a project that could, within 8 to 12 weeks, produce a meaningful, sustainable change in practice or process that can be empirically evaluated, with minimal or no risk to participants or the organization.
  • Synthesize scholarly, authoritative evidence supporting each part of the project charter.
• Competency 4: Address assessment purpose in a well-organized text, incorporating appropriate evidence and tone in grammatically sound sentences.
  • Write clearly and coherently, using communication style and vocabulary appropriate for scholarly work.
  • Correctly reference and cite scholarly and/or authoritative sources.

Preparation

To successfully prepare for this assessment, you will need to:

• Ensure that your project aligns with your practicum site expectations and the DNP expectations for doctoral projects.
• Conduct a comprehensive review of the literature to gather data that will support your identified need, intervention, and assessment “instrument(s)”:
  • Focus your research on current resources available through peer-reviewed articles and professional and government websites. Current means less than five years old. 
  • Use these research guides for help in identifying scholarly and authoritative sources:

Instructions

Note: The assessments in this course must be completed in the order presented; subsequent assessments should be built on both your earlier work and your instructor’s feedback on earlier assessments. If you choose to submit assessments prematurely, without considering and integrating your instructor’s feedback, your assessment may be returned ungraded, resulting in your loss of an assessment attempt.

This assessment has been identified as a Signature Assessment. Signature assessments serve a dual purpose: to meet the competencies in the course where the signature assessment appears and acquire skills needed to demonstrate competencies specific to the completion of the Doctoral Project Report. Learners must successfully meet the established criteria for demonstrating competence on this assessment in order to successfully complete the course (see University Policy 3.4.07 Grading). Completion of this course is a program-specific requirement. Consequently, learners must pass this course in order to remain in good academic standing (see University Policy 3.01.04 Academic Standing).

This assessment also includes review by a Secondary Reviewer to ensure the work meets doctoral expectations for writing, content, connection to the discipline, scholarship, quality, integrity, and ethical compliance. Secondary review is both an essential program expectation and important opportunity for learners. A hallmark of doctoral learners, in particular, is openness to critique and responsiveness to feedback. Like any scholarly endeavor (e.g., journal article, book chapter, or dissertation), the doctoral project will benefit from the integration of feedback from a reviewer and a process of ongoing revision at each stage of development.  Learners may also reasonably expect to incorporate revisions and refinements of components of earlier completed signature assessments as they advance through the program to ensure the coherence and alignment of their completed project.  A doctoral-level project should, therefore, be viewed as a work-in-progress that is not completed until the final Dean review and approval is issued.

As you begin work, you may find the following activities helpful to completing a scholarly, successful project charter. Note: These activities are not mandatory; they are optional:

• Seek out free writing workshops and other resources available through the Capella Writing Center. The Writing Center’s workshops address such topics as: correct APA usage, paper organization, synthesis of material, and so on.
  • Note: Remember that this keystone course will help determine whether you are ready to proceed with your doctoral project. You will want to do everything you can to ensure that your critical thinking, research, and writing skills are at the doctoral level.

For this assessment, you will populate the three parts of the Project Charter Template [DOCX] with detailed information. Use the Project Charter Proposal Checklist [PDF] to ensure all content is included. Faculty will use the checklist to provide additional feedback.

• Part 1 includes these sections:
  • General Project Information.
  • Project Team.
    • You may find the work you did in the Team Effectiveness in Health Care Settings assessment helpful to you as you complete this portion of your Project Charter.
  • Stakeholders.
• Part 2 is the Project Overview and includes these components:
  • Project Description/
    • Write the project description in a narrative style. Avoid bullet points and incomplete sentences.
  • Evidence to Support Need (background and significance).
    • Be sure to provide the most relevant, data-driven evidence to support key points.  
  • Project Purpose/Business Case.
  • SMART Objectives (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-Bound).
  • Deliverables.
  • Project Scope.
  • Project Milestones.
• Part 3 includes these sections:

Note: You may find the work you did in your Ethics Analysis assessment helpful as you complete this section of your project charter.

• SWOT Analysis.
• Known Major Risks.
• Ethical Considerations.
• Constraints.
• External Dependencies.
• Communication Strategy:
  • Consider questions like these in your communication strategy: Will you hold an in-person or video conference-kickoff meeting? How will you communicate with all involved parties (email, telephone, periodic meetings, project tools, et cetera)?
• Proposed Outcomes.
• Data Collection Plan.

Example Assessment: You may use the following to give you an idea of what a Proficient or higher rating on the scoring guide would look like: