Dealing with Late or Poor Quality Deliverables

Projects are a set of deliverables that build on each other. Sometimes, some of these deliverables are delivered late or — once delivered — of unsatisfactory quality.

So the question is, how do you deal with this issue as a project manager or project controller?

Each deliverable has, or should have, one unique responsible. If this person was (for whatever reason) not able to deliver the deliverable on time or if the quality of the deliverable was not acceptable, there are two possibilities:

1. The responsible person has to re-deliver the deliverable and for this gets a new delivery date.
2. Another person takes over the deliverable as a responsible person.

In both cases, a new entry is required in the project control sheet and dependencies need to be re-adjusted from the previous to the updated delivery.

Ideally, you should accumulate all sub-deliverables in its own aggregation. In no case you should just override the previous deliverable and just give it a new date. This hurts the (in the IT world) well known principle of Immutability, Immutability means, that you should not override the state, but rather make a new state that incorporates the changes.

Adding a new deliverable that is making up for the failed previous one generates the necessary transparency and also leaves the evolution of the project intact for a later review.