Impact Charters in Scale B.O.S.S.

How weaknesses become chartered work, where charter work lives, and how the charter system connects Ideas, Company Charters, My Board, discussions, and notifications.

What this guide covers
This guide explains the charter workflow as it appears in the current software. It starts with the Weakness Resolution page, then walks through the Company Charters board, the Ideas intake board, the personal My Board workspace, and the built-in discussion and message tools that keep charter work visible.

In Scale B.O.S.S., an Impact Charter is the bridge between diagnosis and execution. Evaluation surfaces weaknesses. Weakness Resolution gathers them into one place. The charter system is what turns one of those weaknesses into defined work that can be owned, discussed, tracked, and completed.

That structure matters. Teams usually know something needs to improve long before they define the work well enough to get traction. A charter closes that gap. It forces the organization to name the initiative, explain why it matters, assign leadership, set timing, and decide what success should look like before execution drifts into vague activity.

Weakness Resolution is the intake point for weakness-driven charter work.
Company Charters is the organization-wide portfolio board for formal charter initiatives.
Ideas is the structured suggestion layer where employees can surface improvement opportunities for review.
My Board is each user's lightweight Kanban workspace for day-to-day execution and personal follow-through.
Discussion threads and the message center keep charter conversations connected and visible.

1. How a weakness becomes an Impact Charter

The most important thing to understand is that the charter system does not start in the Charters area. For weakness-driven work, it starts in Weakness Resolution.

Weakness Review is where surfaced weaknesses are assessed, assigned, and connected to Impact Charters.

Each weakness card gives leadership the basic inputs needed to decide whether the item should move forward and who should own the work. In the current workflow, the card includes impact/value, time to resolve, the assigned owner, and an Impact Charter action area.

Impact / Value captures how meaningful the improvement would be to the organization.
Time to Resolve captures the likely effort horizon for addressing the issue.
Assigned To identifies who is accountable for moving the issue forward.
Create Charter starts a new charter directly from the weakness card.
Link Existing lets the team connect the weakness to a charter that already exists, which helps avoid duplicate projects.

Important workflow rule
The Weakness Review screen makes the relationship explicit: every weakness needs an Impact Charter before moving to Development. In other words, once a weakness is important enough to become structured work, the platform expects it to be tied to a charter rather than left as a vague concern.

This is what makes the charter system so useful in practice. Weaknesses do not stay buried inside Team to Market, Business Essentials, or Key Business Drivers. Once they are surfaced and judged worth working on, they move into a formal initiative structure.

2. Creating a charter: what the form is asking for

When you create a charter, the system opens a structured charter form. The goal is not to create paperwork for the sake of paperwork. The goal is to make the work clear enough that execution has a real chance of succeeding.

Before anyone clicks Create Charter, leadership should be able to answer eight practical questions
What are we actually fixing? Why does it matter to the business? What kind of initiative is this? What will the project include? How will we know it worked? What could cause it to fail? Who is responsible for delivery? And what is a believable operating window for the work?

The form is a scoping tool, not just a storage tool.
It forces the team to translate a problem statement into a deliverable initiative.
It also creates consistency, which makes charter review easier later.

Top portion of the Create New Charter form.

Core definition fields

Field	What it captures	How to use it well
Charter Name	The working title of the initiative.	Use a name that describes the outcome or capability being built, not a vague label like "Improve Operations."
Purpose	The plain-English goal of the charter.	Write one clear sentence explaining what the initiative is meant to accomplish.
Charter Type	The kind of work this initiative represents.	Choose the type that best matches the nature of the project: General, Hiring, Automation, Process, Action Item, or Weakness.
Also designate as a weakness	Creates a linked weakness item from the charter side.	Use this when charter work is being created directly in the Charters workspace but should also be reflected on the Weakness Resolution page.
Deficits & Solutions	The problem being addressed and the proposed remedy.	State the current gap clearly, then summarize the intended fix or direction.
Impact on Business	Why this initiative matters.	Tie the charter to business outcomes such as growth, margin, capacity, client experience, control, or execution quality.

Notice the two-way linkage built into the form. Weaknesses can create charters from the Weakness Resolution page, but a charter can also be designated as a weakness from within the charter form itself. That keeps the system flexible: leadership can originate work from surfaced weaknesses, while still allowing strategic initiatives created elsewhere to remain connected to the weakness pipeline when appropriate.

Lower portion of the Create New Charter form.

Execution and accountability fields

Field	What it captures	How to use it well
Project Definition	The scope, deliverables, and overall approach.	Describe what will be built, changed, documented, or implemented, and where the boundaries of the work are.
Success Criteria	How the team will know the initiative worked.	Use observable outcomes, decision gates, or measurable improvements rather than vague statements.
Failure Risks	What could cause the charter to stall or fail.	Call out the real adoption, resourcing, leadership, data, or coordination risks early.
Project Leads	One or more leaders responsible for delivery.	Assign the right people up front. The first selected lead becomes the primary lead.
Start Date / End Date	The operating window for the work.	Choose dates that reflect actual cadence and capacity, not aspirational timing that leadership will ignore.

What a good charter does	What a weak charter looks like
Defines the work before the work starts. Clarifies ownership instead of assuming it. Makes success and failure visible. Gives leadership something concrete to review.	The title is vague. The purpose repeats the problem without defining the project. Success is not measurable or observable. No one really owns the work.

3. Company Charters: the main charter portfolio

Once created, formal charter work lives in Company Charters. This is the main organization-wide charter board — the shared operating view for strategic initiatives that are large enough to deserve structured ownership.

Company Charters is the organization-wide board for active charter initiatives.

The board is organized like a portfolio Kanban. In the current interface, charter cards move across Backlog, Scoped, Doing, and Done. That layout gives leadership an immediate view of which initiatives are waiting, which are defined, which are underway, and which have been completed.

Backlog holds charter work that has been captured but is not yet actively being worked.
Scoped holds charter work that has been defined and prepared for execution.
Doing shows active charter work in progress.
Done shows completed initiatives.

The board also supports filters by scope and type. In the current interface, users can filter by organization scope and by charter type, including Hiring, Automation, Process, General, Action Item, and Weakness. That makes it easier to review only the kind of work relevant to a given leadership discussion.

This is the screen that turns the charter system into an operating portfolio instead of a stack of disconnected plans. Weakness-derived charters appear here alongside broader strategic charters, so the organization can manage the whole improvement pipeline in one place.

Visibility and accountability
Assigned charter ownership does not stay hidden inside the board. Charter assignments also surface on the assigned user's My Dashboard, which helps keep strategic responsibilities visible in the same daily operating view people already use.

4. Ideas: structured intake for opportunities and suggestions

Not every improvement should start as a formal charter. Some items need leadership review first. That is where Ideas fits into the system.

Ideas gives employees a structured place to submit initiatives for Strategy Team review.

Ideas is the intake board for opportunities, recommendations, and proposed projects that are not yet approved charter work. It is especially useful when employees see a problem, spot an opportunity, or want to propose a solution without immediately creating a formal company charter.

Pending Review is where new suggestions wait for initial review.
Planning holds ideas that leadership is actively refining or considering.
Approved is the place for accepted ideas.
Rejected keeps the decision record for ideas that are not moving forward.

The form reflects that purpose. It captures enough information for good review, without forcing the team to fully scope a project before leadership has decided the idea should move ahead.

The Suggest Idea form captures title, charter type, description, business impact, suggested leads, and — when expanded — optional planning details.

The Suggest Idea form captures title, charter type, description, business impact, suggested leads, and — when expanded — optional planning details such as deficits and solutions, project definition, success criteria, failure risks, suggested approach, and proposed dates.

In practice, Ideas and Company Charters play different roles. Ideas is for consideration. Company Charters is for commitment. That distinction helps the organization avoid prematurely creating formal projects before leadership has decided they deserve time, ownership, and capacity.

Good operating discipline
Use Ideas when the organization needs review, refinement, or prioritization. Use Company Charters when the organization has decided the initiative is real work that should be owned and tracked.

5. My Board: lightweight personal project management

The charter system is not only about leadership portfolio views. It also has a practical execution layer for individual users. That layer is My Board.

My Board is each user's lightweight Kanban workspace for personal execution.

My Board is a lightweight personal Kanban and to-do system. It gives users a place to manage their own work with a simple set of columns — Backlog, To Do, In Progress, and Done — plus filters for urgency and priority. This is intentionally lighter than a full project management platform. It is designed to support real execution without overcomplicating daily work.

Users can quickly add new items directly from the board.
Priority chips let users filter for Urgent, High, Medium, or Low items.
Search and item-scope filters make it easier to isolate the right work.
The board supports fast capture for follow-up tasks that come out of charter work.

Item detail views support details, to-dos, due dates, collaborators, and sub-status tracking.

The item detail modal makes the lightweight-project-management role of My Board clearer. Users can capture a description, set a due date, choose a sub-status, add members, and maintain a checklist of to-dos. The system also shows that changes save automatically, which reduces friction for day-to-day updating.

This is important because charter work almost always creates follow-up work at the individual level. The Company Charters board tells the organization what strategic initiatives exist. My Board helps each person manage the action layer that supports that initiative.

6. Discussion inside the work, not outside it

A major strength of the charter system is that discussion stays attached to the work itself. Instead of scattering project conversations across email, side chats, and meeting notes, users can discuss the initiative directly in the charter or item.

Discussion threads let teams talk directly inside the charter or work item.

The discussion tab supports back-and-forth conversation tied to the specific charter or item. Team members can ask for status, flag risks, push for decisions, and document next-step questions without losing the thread. Because the discussion is attached to the work, anyone who opens the initiative later can quickly understand the recent history and context.

Discussion helps keep execution conversations attached to the right initiative.
Questions, concerns, and updates remain visible to the group instead of getting lost in private threads.
The conversation becomes part of the operating record of the charter.

7. Notifications and the centralized message view

The system also provides a message center at the top right of the application. This is where users can see discussion activity across the platform, including charter-related conversations.

The message center aggregates discussions and lets users jump directly into the relevant conversation.

In the current interface, the Messages panel supports filters such as All, DMs, Groups, Charters, Broadcasts, @Mentions, and Unread. That matters because it gives users a single inbox for operational conversation instead of forcing them to open each charter one at a time to see what changed.

This is the connection between local discussion and organization-wide visibility: the discussion tab is where the conversation lives, and the message center is where users can monitor and return to those conversations efficiently.

How discussion and notifications work together
Think of the discussion tab as the room where the conversation happens and the top-right message center as the hallway inbox that tells you which rooms need your attention.

8. How the whole charter system works together

When used well, the charter system creates a clean path from diagnosis to execution. Each workspace has a different job, and the system becomes much easier to manage when the organization respects those roles.

Workspace	Primary role	Why it matters
Weakness Resolution	Captures surfaced weaknesses and determines which ones need structured action.	Create a new charter or link an existing charter so the weakness becomes real work.
Company Charters	Holds the official portfolio of organization-wide charter initiatives.	Move charter work through Backlog, Scoped, Doing, and Done.
Ideas	Collects suggestions, opportunities, and proposed initiatives that need review.	Refine, approve, reject, or hold for planning before formal commitment.
My Board	Helps each user manage personal execution with a simple Kanban.	Track follow-up actions, personal tasks, and supporting work.
Discussion + Messages	Keeps conversation tied to the work and visible across the app.	Discuss, respond, monitor mentions, and follow updates from a central inbox.
My Dashboard	Surfaces ownership and assignments in the user's daily operating view.	Keep charter accountability visible where people already work.

That is the practical operating logic of Impact Charters in Scale B.O.S.S.: weaknesses surface the need, charters define the initiative, ideas widen the suggestion funnel, My Board supports personal follow-through, and discussions keep the work alive inside the system.

9. Best practices for writing stronger Impact Charters

Name the charter after the capability or outcome you are trying to build, not the frustration you are complaining about.
Write the purpose in plain English so an outsider can understand the goal in one sentence.
Use success criteria that leadership could actually review later.
Call out real failure risks early. The risks you ignore usually become the risks that slow the project down.
Assign the right leader up front. A charter without a clear owner usually turns into discussion without traction.
Use Ideas for suggestions that still need review. Use Company Charters for work the organization is ready to commit to.
Use My Board to manage personal action, not to replace the formal charter portfolio.
Keep discussion inside the work whenever possible so context is preserved.

At its best, the charter system gives the organization one connected improvement environment: weaknesses are not forgotten, projects are not undefined, ideas are not lost, and individual follow-through is not detached from the larger initiative. That is what makes the system more than a form. It becomes part of how the company resolves issues on purpose.

Note on visibility
Some screens and actions may vary by role, permissions, or organizational setup. The workflow and page structure described here reflect the current software shown in the provided screenshots.

Impact Charters In Scale B.O.S.S.: From Weakness To Execution