Understanding project types

Choosing a type does one substantial thing: it sets the required phases, the named stages that the Charter groups by, the Roadmap lays out, and work-plan tasks resolve against. Everything else adapts around them.

The types

• Integration (Pre-Close, Day 1, First 30 Days). A buy-side acquisition you are absorbing.
• Buy-side divestiture (Pre-Close, Day 1, First 90 Days). You are the buyer of a carve-out and are standing the business up.
• Sell-side divestiture (Pre-Separation, Separation Day, First 90 Days). You are the seller, writing the TSA addendum and running services out.
• Transformation (Planning, Pilot). A program with no close and no cutover, so the band is two phases rather than three, followed by rollout waves.
• Value creation and Agentic transformation inherit the Transformation shape.
• Cloud migration takes its phases from the provider model: Assess, Mobilize, Migrate on AWS; Assess, Ready, Migrate on Azure. Cloud Migration is sold through AWS Marketplace.

Why the required ones cannot be renamed

The phase name is the vocabulary key. Charters, work-plan tasks and the Roadmap all point at it by name, so a rename would silently detach them. Dates stay fully editable, and every phase outside the required band, the quarterly tail, the TSA exit quarters, the rollout waves, can be added, renamed or deleted as you like.

Picking between two that nearly fit

Ask what your Day 1 is. If there is a cutover date the whole program points at, you want one of the deal types. If there is not, you want Transformation. A carve-out that you are buying is a buy-side divestiture even though it feels like an integration, because the first 90 days, not the first 30, is where the work sits.