The problem with Planner from a project point of view is that it doesn't allow
you to easily see how close you are to your objectives or what the deliverables
are. These can be implied e.g. a Milestone can be defined and given a title of
"Completed Product" and "Completed Install Manual" but what needed is a nice and
easy View of these, though I don't just mean a view of milestones.

What I'm envisaging is that this view would also be the default view and that
project managers input the project deliverables and then focus on tasks and
resources for each of these deliverables in turn. You would set an association
(I'll call it a binding) from 1 or a set of tasks (and thus implicitly the
assigned resources) to each deliverable. This would thus allow you to quickly
show how many of the project deliverables are actually completed as opposed to
how much of the tasks are completed; a subtle but important difference when it
comes to actually getting payment from a client for whats delivered (Imagine the
message "I'm not paying you to complete tasks but paying you to deliver my
manual/program/widget".

A deliverable is not complete until all the tasks its bound to are complete. we
would have to work on a heuristic for completion but the most obvious is simply
the sum of all the bound tasks (work * completion).

I'm thinking a table view,

|Deliverable | %Compl | Due Date | Work To Go | Bound To    | Resources  |
+------------+--------+----------+------------+-------------+------------+
| Widget 1   |  15%   | 1 October|   15 Days  | 1.6.5, 2.5  | RH, LP, ACS|

With hotspots on the WBS and the Shortname.

etc etc etc.