Managing projects in business can be challenging. There are lots of things to keep track of to ensure your project can succeed, including the topic of this article: deliverables. Project management deliverables come in different types and varieties, which we’ll be exploring today. But first, let’s cover the basics of the concept.

What are deliverables in project management?

Deliverables are the results that you must produce at varying stages of the project life cycle. These are outputs that can take a wide variety of forms, which will depend largely on the type of products you’re working on. Each project you start in your business will need to have at least one deliverable. However, they can have many more expected outcomes, especially longer-lasting projects.

As an example, let’s say you’re working on a website. In this case, your project outputs might include a design mockup, certain individual pages, and a header element.

Project management deliverables allow you to stay more organized throughout the entire process. In turn, this will help you achieve your objectives more effectively. Speaking of which, objectives and deliverables are two very similar concepts. As a result, professionals often confuse them for one another. Let’s now explore the differences between the two.

Project management deliverables vs objectives

The main difference between the objectives and deliverables of a project is when they’re achieved. Typically, objectives are completed close to the end of a project. As a result, these are relatively significant achievements. Deliverables, on the other hand, can be at any stage throughout the life of a project—from the beginning to the end. This transitions us nicely to our next topic of discussion: the different types of deliverables in project management.

The Types of Project Management Deliverables

Deliverables in project management can come in lots of different variations. We’ll be exploring three ways of classifying them:

• Internal vs External
• Tangible vs Intangible
• Process vs Product

Internal vs external deliverables

Internal and external project deliverables simply refer to who an expected output is for. These two are named intuitively, with internal ones being meant for internal use and external ones being meant for a client. An example of an internal deliverable is specific support guidelines for a product. External outputs, meanwhile, can be anything from software to tangible products. Speaking of tangible, this is our next point of discussion.

Tangible vs intangible deliverables

There are several ways to define tangible and intangible deliverables in project management. The more common method follows the original meaning of the word tangible: something that can be touched. Following this logic, a physical prototype would be considered a tangible deliverable. Software, meanwhile, would be intangible.

Other definitions of tangible and intangible outputs classify non-measurable results as tangible. These would be the final products of the various stages of your project. Intangible deliverables, on the other hand, would allow you to measure progress toward a specific goal—like increasing revenue.

Process vs product deliverables

Like internal and external deliverables, process and product outcomes are self-explanatory. A process deliverable is something that you may need to complete throughout the life cycle of a project. A product deliverable, on the other hand, will typically come at the end of a project—when you’re ready to deliver the final product.

Why You Should Define Deliverables in Project Management

Defining clear expected outputs can help your staff stay organized. In turn, this will help you in the following important steps as you work on your project:

• Keeping track of progress as your team works on your project
• Enhancing transparency with clients and partners
• Ensuring final quality standards and addressing any shortcomings

Keeping track of progress

Monitoring the progress of your projects is vital in guaranteeing their success. Whether you choose to do this manually or through a project management tool, setting clear deliverables will make your work easier. You can set deadlines for different expected outcomes and keep track of their delivery dates. Do this throughout the entirety of a project’s lifetime and you can identify performance bottlenecks in time. Consequently, your projects will also be more likely to be completed well before their due dates.

Enhancing transparency with clients

If you’re working on a project for a particular client, setting clear deliverables is key. This will allow your customer to be more confident throughout the entire process. They’ll be able to request any adjustments before it’s too late, which will be quite beneficial for your team as well. A clear deliverables timeline will result in a better overall experience for your clients, enhancing their loyalty to your business.

Ensuring final quality standards

Setting deliverables at various stages of your project will make it easier for you to assess the quality of your project’s final results. By examining the quality of each of these deliverables, you’ll be able to split the work of your QA team into smaller chunks. Besides simplifying your staff’s work, checking quality at more than one stage will help you catch and fix any shortcomings in time.

Common Challenges with Deliverables in Project Management

Having covered why you should define deliverables, let’s now explore a few challenges you might face when doing so. These include:

• Poorly defined expectations: clients often fail to communicate their expectations for a project clearly. This can lead to a bunch of duplicate work for your team, slowing them down.
• Lacking communication from the client: continuing on the topic of communications, some clients are bad at it both at the start and throughout the lifecycle of their projects. Just like our previous point, this can slow things down for your team.
• Scope creep: you’re probably aware of the concept of scope creep. What starts as a relatively small project can quickly spiral into something much larger.

Fortunately, minimizing the impacts of these challenges is fairly straightforward with certain productivity tools: time tracking software.

Setting Project Management Deliverables with Time Tracking

Time trackers with project management solutions can make setting deliverables trivial. Here are a few steps along your project management journey where time tracking can be beneficial:

• Identifying and defining deliverables
• Setting deadlines and expectations
• Assigning staff responsible for deliverables

Identifying and defining deliverables

The first step to completing project deliverables is identifying them. This will involve splitting your project into smaller parts and assigning end goals to each. You should also define the key details of each expected result. These will differ greatly for various types of deliverables. For example, you may want to set a target length and format for something like a report or action plan. On the other hand, you might want to set only a deadline for a specific software feature. Conveniently, deadlines are our next point of discussion.

Setting deadlines and expectations

After identifying what you want to achieve and how, you should start setting deadlines. These will allow you to establish the timeline of your project deliverables, which you’ll then be able to use to track your team’s progress. It’s important that everyone in your team is aware of deadlines. This will help them know what to expect in their day-to-day to ensure the project can be completed successfully.

Assigning staff responsible for deliverables.

Project management deliverables often have someone responsible for them in many of the world’s most successful firms. These employees are assigned the role of an owner. What this means is that they’ll coordinate work for a particular deliverable. However, an owner doesn’t necessarily have to work on their targets directly.

Final Thoughts

Clearly defined deliverables in project management can help your team stay organized. They’ll help you track project progress in your business and ensure that your objectives are reached on time. You can further simplify your work by using a time tracker with powerful project and task management features, like WebWork. This will help you complete projects on time and accelerate the growth of your organization.