https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Batch+Task+Plugin "adds batch tasks that are not regularly executed to projects, such as releases, integration, archiving, etc. In this way, anyone in the project team can execute them in a way that leaves a record."

This is useful in an environment where there is no time limit on promotion from dev>qa>production.

If we have a formal approval process for production promotion that may result in deployment to all production machines or a subset that does not really fit into a pipeline model but can easily be represented with batch tasks.