Deliverable is a term used in project management to describe a tangible or intangible object produced as a result of the project that is intended to be delivered to a customer (either internal or external). A deliverable could be a report, a document, a server upgrade or any other building block of an overall project.[1]
A deliverable may be composed of multiple smaller deliverables. It may be either an outcome to be achieved (as in "The corporation says that making a profit this year is a deliverable.") or a product to be provided (as in "The deliverable for the completed project consists of a special-purpose electronic device and its controlling software.").
A deliverable differs from a project milestone in that a milestone is a measurement of progress toward an outcome whereas the deliverable is the result of the process. For a typical project, a milestone might be the completion of a product design while the deliverable might be the technical diagram of the product.
In technical projects, deliverables can further be classified as hardware, software, or design documents.
In the US DoD, a deliverable is any item delivered to the government under a contract, whether it is a physical product or an item of data. A “nonseverable deliverable” means a deliverable item that is a single end product or undertaking, entire in nature, that cannot be feasibly subdivided into discrete elements or phases without losing its identity.[2]