What Charter does

Charter is an administration tool for an entire Azure DevOps project collection. It lets you define how work should be tracked and how deployments should be governed, then apply that definition across many projects and processes at once.

Azure DevOps already lets you do all of this. What it does not let you do is do it once. A work item type is configured per process, an environment check is configured per environment in per project, and a service hook is configured per project. Keeping twenty projects consistent means twenty passes through the same screens, and knowing whether they are still consistent means another twenty.

Charter addresses exactly that gap. It reads the current state, shows you where projects have drifted apart, and writes the same configuration to all of them.

What it manages

• Work item types — fields, states, rules and the form layout, across any number of inherited processes.
• Environment checks — approvals, branch control, business hours, exclusive locks, required templates, and the Invoke Azure Function and Invoke REST API gates.
• Service connection checks — the same checks, applied to service connections.
• Service hook webhooks — subscriptions to Azure DevOps events, applied per project.

What it does not do

Being explicit about this matters more than the feature list, because the gaps are where expectations go wrong.

• Charter never deletes a field or a state from a work item type. Removing one from a Charter configuration leaves it in place on the type. Deletion is destructive and irreversible in Azure DevOps, so it is deliberately not something a bulk tool does on your behalf.
• It does not manage project creation, permissions, repositories or pipelines. It configures the process and the governance around deployments, not the projects themselves.
• It is not transactional. See applying changes for what that means in practice and what Charter does to make it recoverable.

Who it is for

Charter is a collection administrator's tool. Everything it changes is collection-scoped configuration, so it requires the corresponding permissions and it appears in Organisation settings rather than inside an individual project.

If you administer one project, you do not need Charter. If you administer fifteen and they have quietly diverged, that is the problem it was built for.