Deliverables Terminology

My answer to your first question.
The Project Management Institute defines deliverable as follows:

"Any measurable, tangible, veifiable outcome, result, or item that must be produced to complete a project or part of a project. Often used more narrowly in reference to an external deliverable, which is a deliverable that is subject to approval by the project sponsor or customer."

In general, the deliverables are usually defined in the contract documents.

To put it really simply: A deliverable is something you deliver, like a report or a drawing.

Imron

1. Deliverables
Deliverables are the products to be provided to your client, both during and at the end of the project. They can be the technical products of the project (what the project has been set up to produce, such as a process plant or a bridge, including documentation, training etc) and the project management products of the project (such as progress reports, the WBS, quality audits).
If there is a Master Deliverables List that has been defined in the Contract or agreed between the client and the main contractor, then that is what you must work with.

It is often done in project schedules to include milestones for the delivery of each of the Master Deliverables in a section at the start of the schedule, linked to the schedule logic tracking the production of the deliverables.

2. S-Curves
S-curves are cumulative plots of the resource usage or costs of the project, from start to finish. They can be expressed in manhours (or similar units) or in costs. They can also be expressed in percentage of budget (cost or manhours) if you are reporting progress to a client and don’t want to show the absolute numbers (such as in a lump-sum contract).

If most of the cost of the project is in expenditure of manhours (such as in a design project), then using manhours as a measure of progress is accurate enough. If there are lots of purchased items and services as well, it is more accurate to use cost as the measure.
To use Earned Value Analysis (which give the most accurate picture of how your project is going against its baseline plan), you need to track the Planned, Earned and Actual Cost (or resource usage) values at each reporting period.
Have a look at the Earned Value Report information in the P3 manual and the online help screens. The S-curve for the Planned curve is obtained using the Tabular Resource or Cost Report for the Baseline schedule.

Of course you can’t produce the Planned S-curve unless your schedule has all the resources &/or costs in it so that you can plot the periodic and cumulative values. And you can’t produce the Actual S-curve unless you track actual manhours or costs when statusing the schedule. Quite often actuals are not tracked, but Earned values can be tracked because they are the sum of the Percent complete x budget cost (or budget quantity) for each activity, summed for the whole project.

Hope this helps.

Take a look at 'Planning Academy' HPCCONSULT.CO.UK Mike Harvey

Imron Visit hpcconsult.co.uk and look under 'Planning Academy' there is an article on Planned Progress Monitoring it may go some way to answering your problem. Most deliverables are tangible an example of this is shown under Feasibility Phase, also 'Planning Academy' Regards Mike Harvey