Here is a test you can run on any statement of work in about a minute. Go down the list of deliverables and ask of each one: could I hand this to someone?
"A 12-page options paper" passes. "Pricing work" does not. The first is an object that can exist on a disk and be sent in an email. The second is a description of how you will spend your time.
The second kind is what the rest of this article is about.
An activity has no finished state. That is not a stylistic complaint — it is the whole problem, and it shows up in three places that all depend on there being a thing.
It cannot be submitted. Submission is an event with a date and a recipient. You can send an artifact. You cannot send "pricing work"; you can only assert that you have done some.
Its acceptance criteria cannot be written. A criterion describes a property of a thing — it covers these sections, it has a recommendation, it gives a range. An activity offers nothing to hold criteria against, so acceptance becomes an opinion formed at the end, which is the one condition you were trying to avoid.
It cannot carry a value or a date honestly. A line item with a fee attached implies something identifiable is being bought. When the item names work rather than an artifact, the fee is attached to effort, and effort is a thing you can spend without producing anything a client recognises as delivered.
The rewrite is mechanical: take the activity, ask what it produces, and name that.
| Written as an activity | Written as an artifact |
|---|---|
| Pricing work | A pricing options paper with a recommendation |
| Stakeholder engagement | A stakeholder map and an interview summary |
| Data review | A data quality assessment with a defect list |
| Support during rollout | A rollout runbook, and a defined support window |
The last row is worth pausing on, because not everything decomposes into a document. When the engagement genuinely buys your availability rather than an object, say so explicitly and bound it — a window with dates is at least a thing with edges, which is what makes it checkable. What does not work is leaving it as an activity and hoping the boundary is understood.
Once a deliverable is a thing, it can carry the fields that make the rest of the machinery work. In the deliverable template each one is a note with its own identifier, its engagement, a value, a due date, and a status; and underneath, a submission record with four rows — submitted, submitted to, accepted, invoice.
That table is the deliverable's history kept on the deliverable itself, rather than reconstructed from your sent mail eight months later when somebody asks when it went out.
There is also a working-notes section, and it is deliberately separate from the artifact's own description. How you produced the thing and what the thing is are different records. Mixing them is how the "what it is" section quietly turns back into a description of activity.
Read your deliverables list. For each line, ask whether you could attach it to an email. If you could not, rewrite it as the object it produces, or bound it as a period with dates. Then write the acceptance criteria against the object, before any work starts.
The deliverable template — with its states, its submission record and its acceptance-criteria section — is published as part of a free, MIT-licensed repository:
https://github.com/engagementdesk/obsidian-consulting-components
The template itself is templates/deliverable.md.
It is designed for Obsidian, which is free to download and published by its own publisher under that publisher's own terms. The tracker queries that come with the components use Dataview, a community plugin, MIT licensed, installed by you from its own author under its own licence — no plugin code is bundled by us. The fields described in this article are plain frontmatter and need no plugin.
More guides on running client engagements in Obsidian: all guides.
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Engagement Desk is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or supported by Obsidian or by the author of Dataview. Those are separate products from separate publishers, distributed under their own terms.