It's been my experience that mission-driven organizations often conflate scope and deliverables when managing projects.

But we should define each clearly and make a distinction between them so that we can use them in different ways to drive project success.  Project scope can help us motivate our team and maintain focus on what is most relevant to our project as circumstances change, while our deliverables really drive the actions of our project. 

• Project scope should define the purpose of our project.  Why we are undertaking the project and what is relevant to the project?

• Deliverables should define our outcomes. What are we going to build during the project and deliver by the end of it?

Conflation often happens because a project's scope or purpose may be to build a particular outcome or deliverable. But often we are actually delivering on several outcomes under one project scope, or we need to define our deliverables as the project moves forward. And because stakeholders may interpret even a simple scope differently, and thus expect varied outcomes, we want to clearly define our project deliverables and distinguish them from our scope.

Learn more about project schedules in our Project Deliverables Microtraining.

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