What is an Artifact?
An artifact is any document, template, output, or deliverable produced while managing a project — charters, registers, backlogs, reports, plans. PMBOK 7 organizes dozens of them into families (strategy, logs and registers, plans, visual data, reports) and attaches its favorite verb: tailor. You maintain the artifacts that earn their upkeep, not the full catalog.
Scrum uses the word more strictly: exactly three — product backlog, sprint backlog, increment — each paired with a commitment (goal, goal, definition of done).
Worked example
A two-month integration project keeps five artifacts: charter, combined risk/issue log, kanban board, decision log, and a weekly one-pager. The 40-artifact corporate template set stays on the shelf — and at the retrospective, nobody can name a decision that suffered for it. Right-sized artifacts are the visible proof of tailoring.