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Overview |
Deliverables in MS Project |
Deliverables in Project Workspace |
External Dependencies |
Deliverables - Overview
A deliverable is a tangible and measurable result, outcome, or product that must be produced to complete a task or project. Deliverable is a work product that you deliver during the project duration or end of the project. Deliverables are generally due at end of each phase.
Typically, the project team and project stakeholders agree on the project deliverables before the project begins.
Deliverables can be documents such as Project Design Document, Process document or Operational of new router as per specifications.
This feature helps you to manage cross project dependencies.
A project manager can define deliverables within their project plan using Project Professional
and have the dates automatically published to a Deliverable SharePoint list within the Project’s workspace.
This allows other project manager to take dependencies on the published deliverables within their
own Project Plans. When there is a change with a deliverable, such as a change in the finish date,
all the project managers who have taken a dependency on the deliverable get informed of the
change with the deliverable when they open their project plan. Deliverables provide a way to loosely tie projects together.
A deliverable does not affect task scheduling on either project, but serves as a way to improve collaboration between projects.
NOTE:
A deliverable differs from a cross-project dependency (cross-project links: Dependencies between tasks in
different Project files, also called external dependencies. Project plans do not need to have a master project-subproject
relationship to include a cross-project link.).
A dependency is an item or service that is needed for a project before the project can start or before it can finish,
such as receiving goods from a supplier. Keep in mind that projects often contain both dependencies and deliverables.
Cross dependency will provide a hard dependency between tasks, so schedule dates automatically change based on external task dates. Whereas Deliverable feature offers a soft dependency, it does not affect task dates in either of the project, but it alerts project managers, so PM can reschedule the dates accordingly.
MS Project Server 2007 supports Deliverables feature. This feature allows us to manage the project deliverables from MS Project Professional 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services.
Please remember, Project Server 2007 does not allow to define the deliverables until you have project workspace is associated with the project plan. It means, your project plan should be published first before you start working on deliverables.
When you publish the plan first time, you will see the option on creating project workspace.
To manage deliverables from MS Project Professional, you should have access to the project plan.
Deliverables can be also viewed and managed from Project Workspace (Windows SharePoint Services). This is useful if your delivery manager and client manager also responsible in determining the deliverables for your project.
This article describes the following sections on how to manage the deliverable in MS Project Server 2007:
Create and manage external deliverable dependencies
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