Like the title already suggests, this post will be about delivery. After all, our customers are most interested in what they are going to get for the money they spend on you, your team and your company you are representing.
Defining the right deliverables at the beginning of the project, will be one of the first tasks to perform in order to prevent not being aligned with the expectations of your customer.
It is important at the beginning of the project, to clearly align with your customer, which tasks, which fases will be gone through during the complete project. This means you will have to provide your customer with a project outline, using different tasks and subtasks. Each of these tasks should have one or more deliverables in order to sign off each task at completion. The sign-off of the deliverable is a good way of dealing with the completion of a project task.
Taking this all together will bring you a list of deliverables. Please discuss this list with your customer in order to align the project outcome. These deliverables can be word documents, sharepoint lists, a deployed version of a complete solution, an new version of a complete solution, ... Each of these are examples of what a deliverable can be. These are the things your customer can see, can touch, can review, and will pay for!
To proceed, your next task is to introduce these deliverables as milestones into your work plan. It will structure your planning and it will make it more easy to put deadlines on specific tasks for specific resources.
It may be of help to provide the development team with samples and templates of these deliverables. This is good practice especially when team member are not completely sure about the expected outcome of their task. Especially the level of detail of a deliverable can cause misunderstandings between a project lead assign the task, and a team member dealing with the task. It is important that each project member feels comfortable with the expectation, and the deliverable for his task.
As this may seem as basic project management, it is often seen that project managers aren't able to satisfy their customers because the customer expected 'something else'. Aligning what the customer expects at the beginning of the project is therefore very important for the succes of the complete project. It is a small step at the beginning of the project, but it clarifies the exact expectations of the customer towards the project team.
Once the deliverables are set, and the work plan is updated with the different milestones, it is time to assign the deliverables to team members who will be assigned as the owner of each deliverable. Each owner will be committed to deliver the deliverable on time. A project sign-off will be closely related to the sign-off of each of the deliverables. As the project team will work towards each of the milestones, the deliverables will progress towards final version, ready to posted to a formal delivery repository.
That's it for now. More to come on this topic in future posts.
Kind regards,
Nico