Question

UUU 7. Review three different template files from Microsoft Project 2016, MindView, or any other project management software tool. What do you think about the WBSs? Write a short paper summarizing your analysis, and provide at least three suggestions for improving one of the WBSs.

Answer 1

A work breakdown structure (WBS) is about Project Management. It does organize a company’s work into smaller fractions and make them more manageable. The point of breaking down a complete structure is to make it: deliverable, more goal oriented, define the hierarchies and decompose the work, so that it can be efficiently executed by the respective teams. Each team gets their own chunks of work, which they need to manage in terms of Budget/ Time Line/ Scope of Work / Resources granted etc. with correct accountability. It eases the understanding of the job, makes it done step by step.

For Example- Construction of Commercial Building with MindView tool. It is organized as below:

• Internal Building work- large electrical and plumbing work (Team A, budget X $, time line 6 months, carried by 10 Engineers, 20 labours)/ small electrical, plumbing and repair work (budget 20% of X $, time line 2 months, carried by 2 Engineers, 4 labours).
• Foundation work of Building- Civil work (team B, budget Y $, time line 2 months, carried by 8 Engineers, 15 labours)
• External work- Painting/ Electrification/ Sanitary is the scope of work (Team A+B, budget Z $, time line 3 months, carried by 18 Engineers, 35 labours)
• Commercial and Legal work- includes documentation (team C, time line- entire total project duration, budget- expenses as accrued on actual)

Improvement areas on WBS:

• WBS can only identify a project deliverables. It can’t portray their chronological order. Hence, it is important for the company management to decide which activity should be carried out in which order, in order to make better use of their resources- manpower and time, effort.
• WBS needs to be listed with assumptions involved in any project activity, not just time, budget and manpower. As many situational or commercial factors can change the flow of activity and affect budget, like extra safety, government regulations, hazardous situations etc., so that it can be changed and managed later on for any uncertainties.
• WBS will fail if it does not have right active interfaces of different management teams. As planning, monitoring, corrective actions and continuous review in a WBS and project management is crucial to it’s success.