The Collaborative International Dictionary
Deliverable \De*liv"er*a*ble\, a.
Capable of being, or about to be, delivered; necessary to be
delivered.
--Hale.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1755, from deliver + -able.
Wiktionary
a. Able to be delivered. n. (context business management English) The tangible end product; that which will be delivered.
WordNet
adj. suitable for or ready for delivery
n. something that can be provided as the product of development; "under this contract the deliverables include both software and hardware"
Wikipedia
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 software product, a server upgrade or any other building block of an overall project.
A deliverable may be composed of multiple smaller deliverables. It may be either an outcome to be achieved (as in "The corporation says that becoming profitable this year is a deliverable.") or an output 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 output, 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 or detailed design report of the product.
A deliverable is more than just a project document in that a project document is typically part of a project deliverable. A project deliverable may contain a number of documents and physical things.
In technical projects, deliverables can be further classified as hardware, software, or design documents.
In contracted efforts, deliverable may refer to an item specifically required by contract documents, such as an item on a Contract Data Requirements List or mentioned in the statement of work (SoW).
A deliverable is something (hard or soft) that can be ready to dispatch to the site or the client as a partial item of the supply foreseen in the contract, e.g. when the project has started some part of the design (when settled), can be anticipated to the sub-supplier who has therefore the possibility of starting his purchase activity of raw material, even if many other parameters are not yet designed by the designer.
In this way many time-savings are possible, shortening greatly the whole project final supply term. This designing activity can be represented in the drawings with a "cloud" around a not yet designed part and means: "this part (size, or other characteristics)will be studied later". The part settled can be "delivered" to the interested parties.
Usage examples of "deliverable".
Was it possible that man had taken a,n evolutionary leap, had innately discovered a method of crunching himself into ten million bits of information, of packeting himself into microbursts of deliverable data consumable to even the crudest receiving unit, something as crude as, say, the household plumbing-- why not?
It has guided me to discuss expectations with my management team, agree on deliverables and a timeline, and then get out of their way and let them perform.
Fuck this up some way, so word gets out that the Argos Group has been playing games with the shield deliverables and also skimming a little off the top, and I will become very upset.