A Comprehensive Guide to Meeting Goals and Deadlines

In project management, setting and meeting deadlines is essential. It enables you to structure the project timeline, monitor progress, and deliver swift, reliable results. Consistently delivering on time helps clients gain confidence in your team, which builds your brand’s reputation.

However, it’s often challenging to set and achieve goals and deadlines. Generous deadlines can encourage less productivity and efficiency in your team, while tight ones can affect the quality of your deliverables.

This comprehensive guide elaborates on project deliverables and their importance while discussing common challenges you may face and how to overcome them.

Types of Project Deliverables

Project deliverables are the intangible and tangible outputs that you need to submit at every project phase. These are the things stakeholders expect at the end of any project.

Deliverables clarify the activities you should undertake to keep the project within the budget and on time. It becomes easier to prioritize work, synchronize efforts, and align all team members.

There are two primary types of project deliverables, internal and external, depending on who will receive them.

Internal Project Deliverables

Internal deliverables go to the collaborating department or team members. These deliverables undergo interval review and help you keep the project on course and running smoothly.

Although they are not customer-facing, they are critical to project success as they contribute to the bigger picture. Some examples are:

• Progress reports
• Budget reports
• Time-tracking reports
• Original design

External Project Deliverables

External deliverables go to investors or clients outside your company. They are the customer-facing outcomes that you share with the stakeholders involved.

Besides a final product, external deliverables can be public reports highlighting how your team spent the allocated money and time. Some examples include:

• Final product or design
• Progress or project report

Essential Elements of a Successful Deliverable

A project deliverable involves any output that directly results from the work your team handles during a project. It should remain within the project scope and have a clear contribution to the project’s goals and objectives.

Once you clarify the initial project requirements, outlining successful deliverables involves three primary steps:

• Determine what you expect the project to achieve
• Define which team members are in charge of each deliverable
• Outline a timeline to complete every deliverable

Most projects have several deliverables, but each one should have clear criteria to determine its success. The criteria should cover these areas:

• Quality- What are the quality standards that the deliverable should attain or exceed?
• Schedule- What timeline do you need to submit the deliverable within the budget?
• Scope- Does the deliverable align with the specifications and requirements highlighted in the project scope?

You must clearly understand every deliverable and what you consider success. If the project deliverables fail to fulfill these criteria, you should consider them failures.

How to Define and Document Project Deliverables

Project deliverables and objectives are interconnected because they focus your team’s efforts toward the same direction and outcomes. Determining the expected project output will help you understand the particular tasks you need to handle.

When defining deliverables, the best approach is to start with objectives and work backward. This process has four key steps, which include:

1. Asking the right questions

Step back and assess the bigger picture of the project. Since you know vital information like how to measure success and the project’s higher-level goals, consider these questions:

• What’s your client’s expectation about the results?
• What’s the project’s purpose?
• How vital is each aspect to the overall project’s success?
• What’s your projected timeline and budget?
• What resources do you need to attain each objective, and how do you go about it?

2. Outlining the requirements

Once you answer these questions, it will be easier to understand the tasks your team must complete. The next step is to clarify each deliverable’s requirements. These requirements highlight the criteria you use to determine whether you’re okay with a certain deliverable.

If you fail to complete the requirements, you’re leaving room for scope creep as you can anticipate revision and change requests. It helps to identify a stakeholder’s or end-user’s priorities in regard to a particular deliverable and what success looks like to them.

3. Identifying the KPIs and OKRs

This step looks deeper into every deliverable to ensure feasibility and accuracy. You can start by dividing the deliverables into smaller phases to make the project more manageable. It also helps you better define the deliverables and a suitable timeline.

You may start by deciding the goals, metrics, OKR (Objective and Key Results), and deadlines for every project phase. Remember that the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) should alin with your budget and project scope.

4. Reviewing and approval

With clear KPIs and deliverables, the next step is to engage the stakeholders to review and approve them. This ensures there are no hidden costs and that the project outcomes maintain the highest quality level possible.

The next aspect to consider is documentation. All projects require detailed and elaborate project management documents, such as:

• Work Breakdown Structure

This project management graph makes it easier to break the project scope into smaller deliverables and tasks that your team must complete.

• Project Scope Statement

This list specifies the project’s final deliverables, whether it’s a service or tangible product. It captures the project details clearly to prevent confusion at later stages.

• project Charter

This brief document highlights the deliverables, the purpose of the project, and the approved areas. It contains an implementation plan, which becomes the guideline for project execution.

Best Practices for Managing Project Deliverables

The importance of project deliverables is clear, but monitoring each one can be challenging as the project continues. You can achieve better results when managing deliverables by implementing key best practices, such as:

• Have measurable and clear objectives

Defining deliverables may be easy, but the challenge comes when deciding how to measure your team’s progress. An objective should be clear and measurable; otherwise, your team will not know when they’re off track.

Think about it this way: if you can’t measure progress, you’ll never be certain whether you succeed and how far along you are from the primary objective.

• Simplify deliverables

Deliverables can be intimidating, especially for client-facing projects. However, you need to understand that they don’t have to be huge. Sectioning them into smaller chunks makes them more attainable while still contributing to the project’s bigger picture.

• Have realistic deadlines

Project deliverables, whether independent or not, have overlapping effects. A simple delay in one aspect can trigger a ripple effect that eventually affects the entire project.
Having realistic deadlines relieves your team of unnecessary pressure and increases the chances of timely success.

• Pace and prioritize deliverables

Breaking deliverables into smaller chunks simplifies the process but leaves you with additional deliverables, even though they are smaller. Presenting a group of many small deliverables to your team can confuse, making it hard to know where to start.

When sectioning deliverables into achievable sizes, ensure you pace those that rely on others and rank them by order of priority. This way, everyone knows what to do next at any project phase.

• Have clear communication

As George Bernard Shaw, an Irish playwright, critic, and political activist, famously said, the most significant challenge in communication is having an illusion that it took place.

In any project, communication is a key driver for success, especially when the tasks involved require collaboration with other teams or departments.

As you keep deliverables on course, your team must also be on track. You need to nurture a work environment where all team members know these things at any given time.

• Which team member is in charge
• What you expect from the team
• Who to consult when faced with challenges or need help

Your project will run seamlessly, on time, and as per the quality standards you expect when your people understand who to approach and for what.

• Leverage project management tools

Instead of maintaining manual records and reports, a better way is to integrate project management software. Advanced platforms come with customizable dashboards, where you can easily access real-time insights into all project deliverables.

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Challenges in Meeting Project Deliverables and Solutions

Challenges in project management are often inevitable. It’s, therefore, crucial to understand the potential issues you’ll encounter as you try to achieve the deliverables. Identifying problems earlier on makes you proactive in finding solutions before the negative impacts touch the project.

1. Ambiguous objectives and goals

Failing to set clear objectives and goals can cause multiple issues, such as poor resource management. Ensure each goal is realistic, clear, and divided into achievable milestones. Every team member will know how their daily activities take you a step closer to the overall goal.

It helps to use goal-setting frameworks, such as:

• SMART- Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound goals
• OKRs- Objectives and Key results
• CLEAR- Collaborative, Limited, Emotional, Appreciable, and Refinable goals.

2. Scope creep

Scope creep is a common challenge in project management. It occurs when the project requirements change from the initial plan. The best approach to deal with scope creep is to:

• Outline the project timeline, deliverables, objectives, and scope at the beginning and have the stakeholders approve the document.
• Adopt a change control process where you have an official change management plan that specifies the procedure to request, evaluate, and approve any changes.
• Establish regular communication with your team and stakeholders so everyone knows the project’s progress and is aware of any upcoming changes.
• Keep a close eye on the progress using project management tools. Intuitive platforms help you implement agile project management methods, so it’s easier to identify scope creep.

3. Unrealistic Deadlines

If your deadlines are unrealistic, you’ll end up with disappointed clients, a frustrated team, lower-quality results, and missed deadlines. Before you set deadlines, assess your team’s weaknesses and strengths to establish what they can deliver within a particular timeframe.

• When you need to change a looming deadline, be upfront and explain to the stakeholders why the timeline is impossible, and support your claim with evidence from data.
• Suggest alternative solutions in a firm but respectful way. Otherwise, you’ll still end up with different unrealistic expectations.
• Use project management software to monitor dependencies, deadlines, and progress.

The Impact of Well-Defined Deliverables on Project Success

Project deliverables are vital as they provide a concise and clear way to determine if a project meets its scope and objectives. All stakeholders know what to expect, which helps in managing expectations.

Deliverables make it easy to manage the resources, budget, and schedule. This, in turn, encourages proper progress tracking, resource allocation, and scheduling. They also offer a practical way to show progress, building stakeholder confidence and trust.

Other outstanding impacts of clear deliverables are such as:

Stakeholder engagement

Deliverables pave the way for communication with your team and stakeholders, allowing space for constructive feedback and smarter decisions.

Accountability and Quality Control

Clear deliverables become the baseline for evaluations and reviews to see if the project meets the outlined quality standards and criteria.

Project Planning and Execution

Well-defined deliverables enable your team to come up with detailed work breakdown structures and project plans. They can easily manage timelines, resources, and specific tasks.

Conclusion

Meeting project goals and deadlines requires a strategic approach. In addition to elaborate planning, effective communication, and proper leadership, tracking progress and promptly addressing any upcoming issues is crucial.

That’s why the best move is to leverage advanced project management platforms. Such platforms provide a single source of truth when it comes to project data. They simplify how you monitor dependencies while helping your team prioritize tasks.

Furthermore, you’ll have access to a customizable dashboard that gives you a comprehensive and real-time view of all project deliverables so you never miss a deadline.