Products and Deliverables

Deliverables are the products or services that are produced by the project and task. All projects have the creation of tangible or intangible deliverables and/or services as a goal.

Traditional project planning focuses mostly on work breakdown structures and creation of tasks that produce deliverables. When a task or a series of tasks is complete, so is the deliverable that is produced by these tasks. When planning or tracking on a high level this works well, however the detailed overview and understanding of where a particular deliverable is at, in terms of completion, at any point in time is often not easy (if not impossible) to determine with task based planning.

As a result, managers often try to track the project at a micro level which results in a large administrative overhead and frustrated team members. When things change in a project, as often happens, the time involved for keeping the schedule up to date becomes too cumbersome and an inconsistent schedule is often the result.

An answer to this dilemma can be found by concentrating on deliverable management on a detailed level and task progress tracking at a high level. This ensures in an accurate reflection of actual progress versus planned progress, which is one of the keys to successful software project management.

Unlike many other project planning packages, WhiteCloud allows to create a detailed hierarchical definition of products and deliverables that can be assigned to team members. Using the To-Do lists, team members can track their own schedules and priorities while the project manager keeps track of the overall progress using the reporting options.

 Further more, tasks and deliverables can be associated. This then provides the ability to track and report on detailed deliverables by state of completeness and at the same time use of a task work breakdown structure for macro level planning, time tracking and cost management.

Whitecloud includes scheduling of deliverables into versions or releases of the project. This allows to schedule a project implementation by having multiple successive iterations of different feature sets. Different methodologies can be easily implemented using this approach. For instance the Rational Unified Process, Feature Driven Development, Evolutionary Prototyping and so on.

The following screen shows an example of a deliverables report from the Product Screen:

Whitecloud provides functionality to associate the following project related information with Tasks and Deliverables:

• Requirements, for instance use cases from the requirements register
• The tasks that produce deliverables
• Different versions of the product that are produced
• Version controlled documentation, documents stored on the network, hyperlinks and screenshots.

Further more, deliverables are key to other areas of the application like Defect Tracking, Risk management, Issues management and Change control.

Topics:

• Introduction
• Projects
• Deliverables
• To Do List
• Time Sheets
• Defect Management
• Pricing
• Contact