Deliverables
Project Gateway 5 incorporates a powerful planning and reporting method,
which we call Deliverables.
The deliverables facility supports top down, goal-oriented management planning and reporting. It is separate from the project management facilities of Project Gateway, but can be closely linked with them.
Deliverables specify specific management goals. You may, from time to time, implement projects to achieve these goals, and when you do, you can set up automatic links between project status and relevant deliverables. But it is important to understand that you can use the deliverables facility before you have projects scheduled, and that the organization of the deliverables may be quite different from that of your projects and programs.
Simply stated, a deliverable is a goal, not a task. As a goal it may have a target date for completion, a budget for completion, and probably will always have an assigned responsibility.
Deliverables are structured as trees. The top goal becomes the head of the tree and each
sub-goal (which we call a sub-deliverable) becomes a leaf of the tree.
The lowest levels of your deliverables tree may be interconnected to specific projects, groups of projects, or project events from multiple projects. Generally, the deliverable will be defined before the projects are created,
and the projects are created to achieve the goals set out in the deliverable. The links to projects may be added or removed at any time.
Since project information may not be available, the deliverable system provides a very flexible way to provide definition details and manual status reporting. You can define deliverables and begin using them as a management-reporting tool immediately.
Most organizations like to believe that with enough time they can create a master-work plan that optimizes everything.
Few ever achieve this. The deliverables facility lets you define a master vision that will at least encompass all of what you are trying to accomplish without requiring you to master all the details of implementation beforehand.
The Deliverables Dashboard
The Deliverables Dashboard view shows the tree structure you have created with colored status indicators for each. This allows you to see the status of a very large effort at a glance.
