Projects are often driven by the deliverables that they have committed themselves to early in the projects development and documentation. There are issues in the way projects devise their deliverables that can affect the proper functioning of projects as complex as those involving the integration of digital libraries with VLEs. The multidisciplinary nature of the project teams can lead to a division of labour using the deliverables that enshrines the divisions that existed prior to the project that brought the different groups together. The DiVLE projects all had to deal with changing current practices and boundaries and could not accept existing divisions.
We recommend that project teams deal with issues that arise from the diverse backgrounds of project personnel explicitly by surfacing differences and dealing with issues jointly rather than simply applying a division of labour that can fossilise old divisions.
A second issue in relation to Deliverables can be the number that a project uses to schedule its work and to divide up discrete tasks. Some projects used fewer Deliverables than others and the decision on how to break down tasks and relate them to a final output can have a significant effect on the coherence of a project and the ease or difficulties encountered in managing it.
Further material forthcoming..... contributions gratefully received