Business Project Management

What are Project Deliverables in Project Management?

project deliverable

Projects create deliverables, which are simply the project’s results or processes. That means a deliverable can be as large as the project’s goal or as small as the reporting that is part of the larger project.

What Are Project Deliverables?

Projects create deliverables that are actually the results of the project or the project processes. That means that a deliverable may be anything as big as the project objective itself or the reporting that is part of the larger project.

Another way to put it is that in every kind of project there are inputs and outputs. That’s what you put into the project, like data, money, etc., and then what’s coming out of it, which are the deliverables. Again, these deliverables can be a product or service and the documentation that is part of the closure of the project can also indicate that the project is complete and everything has been signed off.

A Project Deliverable is a product or service that a project creates for its customer, customer, or sponsor of a project. It is the good or service delivered to its stakeholders by the Project.

Why are Project Deliverables important?

A project is an activity designed to produce a single product or service. It has a fixed length. The project is temporary. Therefore, regular, repetitive activities will not shape a project. P.e.g. Building a stadium for football is a project. Building it can take six months to a year. The project output (The Stadium of Football) will remain there indefinitely. Stadium maintenance would be a routine activity, and would not be listed as a project.

Project Management aims to accomplish the goals of the research under the three constraints. Including scope, time , cost and quality.

A deliverable is a tangible or intangible good or service created as a consequence of a project intended to be delivered. A project may be a report, a document, a software product, a server update or some other building block of a project. It can also be called something definite or specific produced as a result of the work done during the project. Every deliverable must meet a couple of criteria.

Classification of Project Deliverables

  1. External or Internal
  2. Tangible or Intangible
  3. Big or Small

Internal vs External Deliverables

A common way to categorise deliverables is to divide them into deliverables that are “external” and “internal.” There’s a clear way to describe them:

  1. Any work was done that isn’t a part of doing business with clients or customers is an internal deliverable
  2. Any work done to fulfill a client’s demands or to win more business is an external deliverable

Tangible or Intangible Deliverable

A deliverable such as a football ground, a factory, may be tangible. Often you need to prepare so the resources will work on the project. So, you might have a project to educate the staff. It would be intangible.

Big or Small Deliverable

Big or small may be classified by the client. So, that would be dependent on the need. There are no clear guidelines for that. For another project/customer, something small for one project/customer can be big.

Project Charter

This is the most important deliverable of the project. There is no project without a project charter. It expresses the project’s primary objective.

It gives an overview of roles and responsibilities. It outlines the main stakeholders and defines the project’s objectives. It gives authority to the project manager.

The purpose of the project charter is to document:   

  1. Project Objectives
  2. Constraints of the project
  3. Internal & External Stakeholders
  4. In-scope activities 
  5. Out-of-scope activities
  6. Assumptions
  7. Benefits of project outcomes
  8. Positive & Negative Risks
  9. High-level budget and spending authority

The three main uses of the project charter are:

1.To authorize the project. Projects can be ranked using a comparable format. Return on investment can be used to authorize them.

2.Serves as the primary sales document for the project – ranking. Stakeholders have a 1-2-page summary to distribute, present and keep handy. This helps to fend off other projects running for the same project resources.

3.Serves as a focal point throughout the project. For example, it is a baseline that can be used in team meetings. It assists with scope management in change control meetings.

For a large multi-phased project, the project charter can be created for each individual phase. A project charter should be created in the initiating process group of a phase or a project at the very start. Developing the charter and identifying the stakeholders are the two main actions of the initiating process group.

See Also

WBS Dictionary

CPI Project Management