A deliverable is a tangible or intangible good or service produced as a result of a
project
A project is any undertaking, carried out individually or collaboratively and possibly involving research or design, that is carefully planned to achieve a particular goal.
An alternative view sees a project managerially as a sequence of even ...
that is intended to be delivered to a
customer
In sales, commerce, and economics, a customer (sometimes known as a client, buyer, or purchaser) is the recipient of a good, service, product or an idea - obtained from a seller, vendor, or supplier via a financial transaction or exchange for ...
(either internal or external). A deliverable could be a report, a document, a software product, a server upgrade or any other building block of an overall project.
[Cutting, Thomas.]
Deliverable-based Project Schedules: Part 1
. PMHut.com (Last accessed 8 November 2009). A deliverable may be composed of multiple smaller deliverables. It may be either an outcome to be achieved (as in "The corporation says that becoming profitable this year is a deliverable") or an output to be provided (as in "The deliverable for the completed project consists of a special-purpose electronic device and its controlling software").
Some deliverables are dependent on other deliverables being completed first; this is common in projects with multiple successive milestones. In this way many time-savings are possible, shortening greatly the whole project final supply term. This designing activity can be represented in the drawings with a "cloud" around a not yet designed part which means: "this part (size, or other characteristics) will be studied later". The part settled can be "delivered" to the interested parties.
A deliverable differs from a
project milestone in that a milestone is a measurement of progress toward an output, whereas the deliverable is the output delivered to a customer or sponsor.
[ Bernie Roseke]
What is a Project Deliverable?
Project Engineer, 22 November 2016. Accessed 8 August 2017. For a typical project, a milestone might be the completion of a product design, while the deliverable might be the technical diagram or detailed design report of the product.
In technical projects, deliverables can be further classified as
hardware,
software
Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work.
At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...
, or
design documents. In contracted efforts, deliverable may refer to an item specifically required by contract documents, such as an item on a
contract data requirements list In United States military contracts, the contract data requirements list (CDRL, pronounced ''SEE-drill'') is a list of authorized data requirements for a specific procurement that forms a part of the contract.
Overview
The CDRL identifies what dat ...
or mentioned in the
statement of work.
References
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Schedule (project management)