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Continuing with the post on creating a WBS:

1. Assemble the project team and all contributors including people from functional departments and supporting organisations, and any other stakeholders who can assist with understanding the project
2. Get all the relevant documents from the project initiation phase, including the Project Charter and the overall project objective
3. Use an existing template if available
4. Identify all the deliverables and the work that must be done to produce them, and decompose the work through multiple levels into subsets of the major deliverables
5. Continue with the breakdown until the lowest-level work-packages are:

• Small. Typically, the lowest-level package of work should be between about 1% and 10% of the overall project estimated duration
• Measurable, with clear completion criteria
• Assignable to a single owner

Decide how you want to monitor and control the project work, and use this as a way of designing the major headings in the WBS, choosing from the options below:

1. By project Life-Cycle Phase (design, build, test etc.)
2. Using Major Deliverables as the first level (hardware, software, support equipment, training etc.)

Although not strictly a WBS, it is also possible to break down the work by following your Organizational Breakdown Structure, or  “OBS”:

1. By Functional Department (Engineering, Production, Marketing, Finance etc.)
2. By Geographical Location (Singapore, Bangalore etc.)
3. By Skill-Set or Discipline (Programming, marketing, painting etc.)

Here’s an example of a WBS created by Life-Cycle Phase:

And here’s the same work represented by a WBS by Major Deliverables: