The concept of ‘Deliverables Management’ has been present during much of my Project Management life but it took a long while before my understanding went beyond the superficial.  Deliverables Management is one of these ostensibly ‘self-evident’ concepts that requires no further explanation or expansion.  The term ‘deliverables’ seemed to have an obvious stand-alone meaning and was never properly described with process or usage, and therefore never properly leveraged as an effective tool in Project Management. 

In Project Management’s ‘conventional wisdom’ it appears that the idea of a deliverable and its management is so obvious that nothing else is required.

This seemed to be a waste: there had to be more than a self-defining term that ‘everyone’ understood but few could explain.  And so began my process of research and cogitation to find a better use for this term and to codify it as a useful model for software project development. I researched existing publications, I mostly found redundant, self-referential definitions and equally self-referential articles and little else - a “deliverable” is something that “gets delivered”; how it gets delivered is the subject of other techniques and processes.  Fortunately there was the odd academic paper and some magazine and blog articles that helped frame some detail.

I’ve now been using Deliverables Management as an enabler to my own project management activities over the last 10 years or more, and progressively codified this usage. But I have never been able to comprehensively put that knowledge into a coherent manner that can be shared.

Hence, this book; my intention is to provide both a definitional and practical elaboration on the concept of a deliverable, how to think about both its static and dynamic properties and how to improve just about any methodology or development process.