What Is a Project Deliverable? Definition, Examples & More
Projects create deliverables, which are simply the results of the project or the processes in the project. That means a deliverable can be something as big as the objective of the project itself or the reporting that is part of the larger project.
Another way to put that is that there are inputs and outputs in any type of project. That being what you put into the project, such as data, resources, etc., and then what comes out, which are the deliverables. Again, those deliverables can be a product or service and it can also be the documentation that is part of the project closure to show that the project is complete and everything has been signed off.
Project vs Product Deliverables
There is a distinction between project and product deliverables. Project deliverables are such outputs as the project plans, project reports and even meeting minutes. Product deliverables, on the other hand, could be hardware, software, mobile applications, contracts, or even test assessment results.
The deliverables that clients and stakeholders expect at the end of the project are the product or service, of course, but there is also paperwork, as noted. These documents, when completed, are deliverables that clients and stakeholders need in order to evaluate the progress or completion of the project.
This paperwork can include:
Deliverables can vary according to the project’s specifications and the stakeholders’ requirements. But all clients and stakeholders want deliverables that thoroughly wrap up the project at its closure and measure performance against expectations throughout the project.
How to Present Deliverables to Stakeholders
Project managers’ reports are the means by which these types of deliverables are presented to clients and stakeholders. Different stakeholders have different needs, so flexibility and customization is important for effective reporting. In order to meet their needs, project management software must be able to filter the many data inputs to deliver the proper output.
Project management tools such as Gantt charts, Kanban boards, and project calendars can facilitate stakeholder presentations. ProjectManager has one-click reporting that captures data on project variance, time, cost and more. These reports can be shared by PDF attachments or printed depending on the stakeholder’s preference. Better yet, every report can be filtered to show only the data stakeholders want to see. Don’t forget, with our cloud-based software, those reports are reflecting real-time data. If they want to get a high-level view, then share the live dashboard with them. It’s already set up in the tool, unlike our competitors, so you can use it right away. Why not use it today by taking our free 30-day trial.
Get an instant status report on your deliverables with ProjectManager’s real-time dashboard.
ProjectManager Helps You to Build Project Deliverables
Creating deliverables for stakeholders is easy using these reports:
Compiling project status reports is a great way to:
Status Report
Our project status reports are highly customizable, with options to select a wide variety of columns and data sets to pull back exactly the information you’re seeking on the project’s status.
Below is an example of a project status report that can be generated with several variables including Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), planned start and finish dates, planned hours, percent complete, task assignments, start dates and actual hours:
Variance Report
Variance reports can be customized to include only summary tasks, completion percentage, and a comparison of the actual progress of the project versus the forecasted progress:
The resulting report shows a side-by-side comparison of predicted start and finish dates, predicted hours versus actual hours spent and that difference, and the difference in predicted project duration and how long it has actually taken to date:
Timesheet Report
Timesheet reports provide a bird’s-eye view of each individual’s hours worked on a project.
The timesheet shows the person submitting the time, the date of submission, how many individual hours they worked during the selected timeframe, their WBS and how many hours they have remaining in the selected timeframe:
An example of a timesheet for one person working on multiple projects during one timeframe.
Consistent use of these three reports helps keep your team on time, under budget and within scope. Lessons learned libraries can also be a great tool to help build upon successes and avoid duplicating mistakes in future projects.
Lessons Learned Libraries
Creating a lessons learned library is a great way to compile takeaways from projects. It’s a central place to view work that exceeded expectations, and also work that could have been better. As a new project kicks off, project managers use this resource to plan for known roadblocks.
ProjectManager acts as an online hub for all your project documents, keeping you organized and everything at your fingertips whether you’re in the office, the field or home. Use our list view to collect all your reports on deliverables. More than just a to-do list, you can assign, comment and track progress on each item. Save old projects for historical data when planning new ones. Our customized tags make it easy for your to catalog your work so it’s always easy to find.
Collect your reports on deliverables and all project documents on the list view from ProjectManager.—Try It Free!
Project Deliverables Expected Prior to Closure
Development of deliverables doesn’t just happen during project closure. Project sponsors also expect deliverables during the initiation, planning and execution phases of a project. Let’s take a look at the types of deliverables created in these phases in greater detail.
Final deliverables outline a project’s entire scope of work, while deliverables created during earlier phases of a project are based on short-term snapshots of project activity.
Initiation phase deliverables can include a project charter or a business case. The lessons learned library is accessed at the outset of the planning phase, so information can be used from previous projects to better inform the planning of the next project. The communications plan, risk and issue management plan, change management plan, procurement plans and overall project schedule are also created during the planning phase. There are documents surrounding each of these plans which inform stakeholders and clients as the plan is being developed.
Referencing the project plan is the most common activity during project execution. All project activity is managed against the project plan.
Tracking of project execution includes:
Stakeholders and clients can demand reports and logs at a moment’s notice. Always be prepared is the moral of the story.
Stakeholders and clients can request deliverables on a moment’s notice. Being able to shift on the fly and produce what your client wants requires a strong project management tool to keep things organized and up-to-date. ProjectManager is all online, so team members can collaborate on deliverables and rapidly prepare best possible outputs. Try our award-winning software with this free 30-day trial.
What is a deliverable in project management?
Every project has an objective. Whether you’re making some updates to your website or building the next Eiffel Tower, you and your team are working towards something. Ultimately, running a successful project means having something to show for it at the end of the project’s timeline, whether that’s a tangible thing—like a new product or an ebook—or an intangible thing—like a decrease in customer churn or increase in NPS score.
That “thing” you’re working towards is a deliverable. Knowing what your deliverables are and clearly communicating those deliverables to your team and stakeholders can help you hit your project objectives. In this article, we’ll cover everything you need to know to identify, set, and achieve your project deliverables.
What are project deliverables?
Project deliverables are the output you expect to have at the end of your project. Deliverables can be anything—a new product, marketing campaign, feature update, a sales deck, a decrease in churn, or an increase in NPS score, just to name a few. Your project can have one or more deliverables, but clearly identifying what you’re working towards can help your team align and prioritize tasks in order to get their most important work done.
If you’re new to project management, you might have heard some other terms that sound similar to a project deliverable. Here’s how they stack up:
Deliverables vs. project objectives
Your project objectives will help you set your project deliverables, but project objectives are broader than your deliverables. When you define your project objectives, you’re also capturing the benefits and outcomes you expect from those deliverables, especially as they relate to the grander scheme of your project goals and business objectives.
Example of a project objective: Increase company security by introducing SSO and two-factor authentication.
Example of a deliverable: Onboard the entire company onto new SSO service.
Deliverables vs. project milestones
Milestones are checkpoints you expect to hit during your project. They represent the accomplishment of a significant body of work, but they happen during—not at the end of—your project. Think of your project milestones as the building blocks that help you hit your project deliverables.
Example of a deliverable: Roll out new brand marketing campaign across paid social media, YouTube ads, and print.
Example of a project milestone: Hire agency for creative production.
The two types of deliverables
In order to hit your deliverables, it’s important to know what type of deliverable you’re working towards. This will impact how you format and actually hand off the deliverables once the project is finished. There are two types of deliverables, and the type of project you’re working on will determine which type of deliverable you’re working towards.
External deliverable
This is probably what you think of when you hear “project deliverable.” External deliverables are anything you’re producing for clients, like a product or new feature, a social media or marketing campaign, or a sales deck. External deliverables will help you win or maintain your customer base.
Internal deliverables
An internal deliverable, as the name suggests, is something that benefits your company but may not directly impact your customers. This includes things like a company training course or a quarterly budget report. If your project’s end-user is your company, then you’re probably working on an internal deliverable.
5 tips to manage and track project deliverables
1. Clearly define your deliverables
Before you can hit your project deliverables, you first need to know what they are. Aim to create your project deliverables while you’re creating your project plan and defining your project objectives. That way, your team has a clear sense of what they’re working towards from the very onset of the project, as well as a defined roadmap of how you’re going to get there.
To define your project deliverables, start by asking yourself a few questions:
What is this project trying to achieve?
What does “success” look like for this project?
Are we delivering internal or external deliverables?
What is the end result we want to deliver to the external client or internal team?
2. Share your deliverables with key stakeholders
Knowing your project deliverables won’t be helpful if you don’t have buy-in from key stakeholders. Make sure you surface your deliverables effectively and frequently to any key stakeholders so everyone is on the same page. If you haven’t already, share your project plan with them, so they have a way to access your most important project information.
3. Coordinate work with visual project management tools
In order to hit your project deliverables, you need to effectively track your team’s work so you know exactly who’s doing what by when. To do that, you need a central source of truth. With project management software, your entire team has a way to track and execute work, so they know exactly who’s doing what by when. That way, you can share the objective of the project and also track the work your team is doing in real-time.
There are three main types of visual project management:
Kanban boards help you visualize work moving through stages. In a Kanban board, work is displayed in a project board that is organized by columns. Individual tasks—which are represented as visual cards on the board—move through the columns until they’re completed. With Kanban boards, you can get at-a-glance insight into how you’re progressing towards your project deliverables based on where each individual task stands in your Kanban board.
To view your project in a timeline, use Gantt charts. Gantt charts are a bar chart-like view, where tasks are represented as horizontal bars on the bar chart. That way, you can not only see when a task is due, but how long it should take to complete. Track complex processes, like product launches or event planning, with Gantt charts. Gantt chart software also usually has a way for you to visualize project milestones more effectively. With a Gantt chart, you can track exactly where you are in your project timeline, and how you’re tracking towards your deliverables.
Use a project calendar to see your entire month’s work laid out in one central view. As the name suggests, a project calendar looks similar to a traditional calendar, and you can easily drag and drop tasks onto the correct due date. Project calendars are a great way to track monthly production, like an editorial calendar or a social media content calendar. This type of visual project management can help you make sure you’re hitting all of your important daily tasks in order to hit your deliverables at the end of the project timeline.
4. Keep your team up to date with status reports
A project status report is a timely update with high-level information about how you’re progressing towards your project deliverables. That way, you can align with your team on whether or not you’re on track to hit your deliverables. If you aren’t, you can course correct before it’s too late—instead of reaching the end of your project timeline and scrambling to get your deliverables done.
At Asana, we recommend sending weekly or bi-weekly reports to keep your team aligned on your project objectives and deliverables. Project status reports are also a great way to share the big picture with project stakeholders who may not be following the project’s day to day work.
The best way to share a project status update is to do it in the same place where you’re tracking your work. Instead of spending time manually collecting data from a variety of sources, look for a work management tool that offers reporting and status features, so you can get real time insight with the click of a button.
5. Measure success when you finish your project
Hopefully, you’ve hit all of your project deliverables. But even if you did, it’s still important to gather metrics and evaluate the success of your overall project. Did you hit your deliverables but overshoot on your project schedule? Did you hit your deliverables easily with time and resources to spare? If you were working on an external deliverable, how did external stakeholders react? Take some time to debrief with your project team so you can bring any learnings into the next time you create and manage project deliverables.
Before writing your own project deliverables, check out these examples
The deliverable you create will depend on your project objectives and your project plan. Your deliverable should be reasonable for your project scope—in other words, don’t aim to deliver something you’d never be able to accomplish within the project timeline or with the resources you have. Writing a great project deliverable can help you build a successful project and hit your goals. Here are a few common projects and realistic deliverables for each one.
Marketing campaign plan
Type of deliverable: External deliverable
Example external deliverable: One 60-second live-action video, formatted for YouTube.
Sales Plan
Type of deliverable: Internal deliverable
Example internal deliverable: Robust sales and operations planning detailing inbound and outbound sales strategy, revenue targets, target customers, and sales tooling for FY22.
Usability testing plan
Type of deliverable: External deliverable
Example external deliverable: Complete usability testing session with at least 20 participants on August 4th.
Product marketing launch
Type of deliverable: External deliverable
Example external deliverable: Promotion of new product features via social, web, and PR.
Company event planning
Type of deliverable: Internal deliverable
Example internal deliverable: Virtual company holiday party on December 18th.
How Deputy improves company alignment with Asana
Deputy makes workforce planning simpler for employers by enabling them to easily create rosters and track hours worked. It also benefits employees by allowing them to use an app to clock hours and swap shifts. Organizations of all sizes—from SMBs to large enterprises—use Deputy, including Amazon, Aesop, Nike, Messina, and Reliant Healthcare.
Managing technology on a large-scale is tricky at the best of times, but throw in lack of standardization and things can get chaotic. At Deputy, teams were using different work management tools, causing information silos, miscommunication, and lost data. These inefficiencies reduced transparency into projects and deliverables across the company.
Deputy’s solution to this problem was to consolidate all of their workforce management tools. Only one tool would be used company-wide, making collaboration easier and increasing transparency across the business. Deputy chose Asana because it met the company’s needs and offered the best user experience.
It’s been a relief having everything in one place. Asana makes it much easier for us to ensure everyone is rowing in the same direction. ”
Asana is now used company-wide at Deputy by different departments:
Marketing uses Asana Forms for intake requests and manages all of their campaigns in the platform. This has made collaboration within the team easier.
Customer support tracks article development for the Deputy help center to ensure all topics are comprehensively covered.
Customer success manages customer deployments in Asana so timelines and responsibilities are clear.
Finance and other corporate teams rely on the platform to manage their recurring work, like end of month close, and large projects.
Project Management Office (PMO) tracks big projects like compliance and office relocations. Asana tasks ensure no detail is missed.
Corporate engineering plans their quarterly and monthly sprints in Asana and manages projects, like deploying Zendesk for the customer support team, in the tool.
Overall, Asana has created a single source of truth that enables transparency into work happening across the company and ensures every department is moving in the same direction. Increased visibility across projects and deliverables has also improved trust, which is especially important in today’s remote work environment where 59% of employees work asynchronous hours.
With Asana, team members can easily see what everyone is working on in real time and when they can expect those deliverables to be completed. When work is finished, all an employee needs to do is mark a deliverable as complete for the right people to be notified—no email needed. This has helped drive efficiency across the organization because responsibilities, deliverables, and deadlines are clear.
To learn more about how the Deputy team uses Asana company-wide, read the full case study.
Hit your project deliverables every time
It’s a good feeling when you achieve what you wanted to—and hitting your project deliverables is no different. Ultimately, achieving your project deliverables comes down to setting and communicating clear objectives, and then tracking your objectives during the course of your project. To give your team clarity and visibility into work, try a work management tool.
Asana is a work management tool designed to help teams stay in sync, hit their deadlines, and reach their goals. Learn more about Asana.
What is a Project Deliverable?
A Project Deliverable is a product or service that a project produces for its customer, client, or project sponsor. It is the product or service that the project “delivers” to its stakeholders.
It can be tangible or intangible, for example, a contractor who is hired to provide a training course provides the course itself back to their client as the project’s deliverable.
To external parties, a project is often defined by its deliverables. For example, in a house building project the house itself is the deliverable. The focus of the external parties is not the internal metrics like how much profit the project made, how many other clients it produced, and so forth. They are also the measuring stick by which the success of the project, and by extension the competence of the project manager, are measured.
Deliverables vs. Objectives
Project objectives are the goals that the project is trying to accomplish rather than the products that the project is trying to produce. There is a distinct difference. The objectives focus on things external to the project and the deliverables focus on things internal to the project.
A project can seek to accomplish many things, such as:
These are not deliverables because they don’t get delivered to the project sponsor. Although one could argue that the production of the project deliverables is one objective of the project, it is best to keep the two separate. Most projects have other objectives they are trying to accomplish apart from producing the deliverables.
Deliverables vs. Milestones
The main difference between deliverables and milestones is that milestones don’t require a product to be delivered to the customer, client, or project sponsor.
A milestone can be any threshold during which a project transitions to another phase. For example, the completion of the foundation of the house is a milestone, but does not require any submission to the client, customer, or project sponsor, hence it is not a deliverable.
Big vs. Small
Deliverables can be any size. For example, a contractor might have a project to build a large petrochemical facility. The main deliverable is the completed petrochemical plant, although there might be many other deliverables along the way (they have to be provided to the owner to be a deliverable). But to the small engineering company who performs a hydrological study, the deliverable is the completed report.
Internal vs. External
We have described project deliverables to be items developed by the project for its customer, client, or project sponsor. It is irrelevant which organization these people work for, and indeed any one of these people can be internal or external. For example, a project to update the human resources protocols could be carried out in-house. The project sponsor, who is “above” the project, works for the same organization as the project manager. The deliverables are the new human resources protocols, and they are delivered to an internal party.
Project Management
According to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), the project deliverables are identified in the project management plan. At the conclusion of the project planning phase the project management plan is approved by the project sponsor who has then agreed to the type, size, and format of the deliverables. All parties need to be clear with what is going to be produced.
During the project the project sponsor “validates” the scope, meaning they review and formally accepts the project deliverables, thus concluding the project work that produced them.
Therefore, the project manager should document and track each deliverable to ensure the product is formally delivered and accepted. This can be done in the form of a table within the project management plan, for example:
| Deliverable: Design Drawings | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Version | Name | Date | Reviewer | Reviewer Comments |
| 1 | Design drawings Issued for Internal Review | Feb. 2 | Jon Hartney | Email: Feb. 6 |
| 2 | Design drawings Issued for Client Review | Feb. 7 | Bob Jones | no comments |
| 3 | Design drawings Issued for Construction | Feb. 20 | N/A | N/A |
As you can see, this type of tracking makes it clear what version is the working version and what it’s status is.
Obviously, the quality of deliverables is an important item that comes into play in almost every project. During the planning phase, the project manager determines the quality criteria that the deliverables will meet and defines this in the project management plan. Almost every industry has standards which can be pulled from agencies such as:
Other quality-related criteria such as a technical review, project management review, or some other quality criteria can be specified as well.
Throughout the project, the quality of the deliverables is tested via Quality Control and the processes used to produce the product are audited via Quality Assurance audits.
Project Communication
If the finished product is something different than what was expected, clients, customers or stakeholders can be left disappointed even if it was the best product of that kind ever produced.
For this reason, the deliverables are intricately connected with project communication. The project manager performs the following tasks:
Example #1: Writing a Class Paper
Writing a class paper is a project because it is a temporary endeavor that produces a unique product.
Example #2: Building a House
A house building project has the following characteristics:
