Comment by comprev

When I was a contractor I had set deliverables for projects and written agreement on payments for these milestones. One project might have 5-6 milestones.

95% of the time it worked well and the milestones gave an opportunity to review progress with the client, perhaps even a change of direction. On several occasions it lead to extensions (more features) or new projects in the future.

As a self employed contractor (cloud infrastructure), who got badly burned in the past, the key was to have deliverables which were self contained but still required the next chunk of work to be of any use in the bigger picture.

The financial loss for me was only the most recent deliverable should the client decide to ghost me. I did happen unfortunately.

From my perspective, I liked working on multiple sequential deliverables rather than one final one. I appreciate that infrastructure might be more flexible than other areas and often contractors only have one final deliverable.