The Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) – What is it and why is it so important? (2 of 3)
Continuing with the post on creating a WBS:
- 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
- Get all the relevant documents from the project initiation phase, including the Project Charter and the overall project objective
- Use an existing template if available
- 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
- 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:
- By project Life-Cycle Phase (design, build, test etc.)
- 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”:
- By Functional Department (Engineering, Production, Marketing, Finance etc.)
- By Geographical Location (Singapore, Bangalore etc.)
- 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:
