Originally written in French. Translated by AI — the meaning has been preserved, not the prose.
Short definition
A document produced for a determined audience, moment and constraint of form, and which for that reason carries usage choices foreign to the knowledge it sets out.
Full definition
In ordinary project-management usage, a deliverable is what has to be handed over: a contractual expectation, identified and dated. The word is neutral there.
In the articles on this blog, it is used in a narrower sense, oriented by an opposition: the deliverable is an output, as against the material that makes it possible to produce one. What characterizes it is not being handed over, it is being oriented — it selects, simplifies, reformulates and orders for a precise need.
So the following are deliverables in the sense intended here: a specification, a presentation, an article, support documentation, a tender response, meeting minutes.
Usage in the field
Used to designate what must not serve as the source for the next deliverable, and what must not be asked to carry the memory of a piece of work.
Synonyms and variants
"output", used when the emphasis falls on the position in the chain; "final document" in more ordinary usage.
Not to be confused with
- World of ideas — a layer of knowledge that addresses no audience. The deliverable is oriented by construction, that layer never is.
- Build — the workshop where deliverables are manufactured. The build is the place, the deliverable is what comes out of it.
- result — what a piece of work established. The deliverable carries the result, it doesn't reduce to it and doesn't contain it entirely.
Examples
The same knowledge producing a specification for developers and a pitch for management yields two deliverables: they differ in tone, level of detail and degree of caution, without the substance having changed.
Ambiguities / debates
The managerial sense — what is owed — and the sense retained here — what is oriented — often overlap without coinciding. An internal document never handed over is still a deliverable in this blog's sense.