Question

Project Management - Creating a Work-Breakdown Structure (WBS)

Produce a WBS of at least 3 levels (1.1.1) for a "Fun Walk-or-Run" event, intended to raise money for the local community. A minimum of 6 tasks of at least 3 levels (1.1.1) need to be identified.   

Thank you.

Answer 1

Have you encountered work breakdown structures and wondered how they can help in your project management efforts? A work breakdown structure (WBS) is a visual tool for defining and tracking a project deliverable and all the small components needed to create it. With a work breakdown structure, you can stay focused on what you need to accomplish as you move toward the project deadline.

This article will help you understand what a work breakdown structure is and what it is not, the advantages of using a work breakdown structure, and how to create one. You’ll also learn from leading experts on how to use this powerful and essential product management tool with confidence.

In a WBS, the deliverable can be an object, a service, or an activity. By focusing on deliverables rather than methods — the what, not the how — a work breakdown structure helps eliminate unnecessary work to get the intended result. A well-thought-out WBS aids in scheduling, estimating costs, and determining risk. It is usually a visual chart or diagram that spells out a project's timeline and process while capturing each task, subtask, and deliverable that will be created and executed throughout. It’s often rendered as an outline, like a table of contents, but can be organized using tabs or other visual organizational systems.

Rod Baxter, co-founder of Value Generation Partners and author of the Project Management for Success Handbook, calls the WBS “a necessary element to the product management lifecycle. It takes skill and practice to create, but it is essential to help you meet release dates and become efficient.”

History of WBS: A Timeline and a Look into the Future

In 1957, the U.S. Navy’s Fleet Ballistic Missile (Polaris) Program was behind schedule and needed help resolving the delay. The team developed a formula to determine tasks and estimate effort needed for a project based on outcome, which became known as PERT (program evaluation and review technique).

With PERT as a model, the Department of Defense (DOD) and NASA published the first description of the work breakdown structure process in 1962, but the first reference by name didn’t come until 1968. The Work Breakdown Structures for Defense Materiel Items (MIL-STD-881) established work breakdown structures as a standard across the DOD, with templates published for specific military applications, such as aircraft or ships. Even civilian contractors working with the DOD must use the appropriate work breakdown structure template.

In 1987, the Project Management Institute, through PMBOK, established work breakdown structures as standard practice for a range of nonmilitary applications. The term “work breakdown structure” was introduced in 1993 for applications in corporate and other organizational projects.

In June 1999, the PMI Standards Program issued a project charter to develop the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) Practice Standard. According to the PMI, the Planning Process Group begins with three essential steps: scope planning (3.2.2.2), scope definition (3.2.2.3), and work breakdown structure development (3.2.2.4).

Many organizations skip the step of creating a WBS plan, or dictionary, in the interests of nimbleness and agility — or because they are being asked to “build the plane while flying it.” While it’s possible to deliver a project without proper planning and visibility, it will likely take a toll on the team members and, potentially, the ultimately quality of the deliverables. Those risks aren’t sustainable over time, so using WBS when possible is always preferred.

As businesses amass and need to parse more data within every project as well as to anticipate how data will affect a project after it’s launched, it’s clear that the WBS and attentive planning will continue to be critical elements. Other variables on the horizon include globalization, currency fluctuations, political changes, and regulations — so a strong project needs advance planning to navigate these potential dependencies.

Good resources on WBS include “The ABC Basics of the WBS” by Paul Burek and “The Intelligent Structure of Work Breakdowns Is a Precursor to Effective Project Management,” Homer & Gunn, 1995.

What Are the Uses and Purposes of Work Breakdown Structures?

Although often skipped in the planning process, a work breakdown structure or dictionary is a powerful tool for finishing projects efficiently and on time. Here are some of the advantages and benefits of creating a WBS:

• Provides a visual representation of all parts of a project
• Offers an ongoing view for management and team members into how the entire project is progressing
• Defines specific and measurable outcomes
• Breaks the work into manageable chunks
• Provides a way to make successful experiences repeatable
• Sets a foundation for estimating costs and allocating human and other resources
• Ensures no overlap and no gaps in responsibility or resources
• Minimizes the chance of adding items outside the scope of work or forgetting a critical deliverable

In addition, organizations have found other benefits in using work breakdown structures. These benefits can be realized through a specific project, but may also help improve the processes and culture of your whole organization. They include:

• By taking into account each project’s WBS, the organization can quickly calculate the budget for whole departments.
• Teams can determine project schedule and budget quickly.
• As the project progresses, teams can track specific sections of the work breakdown structure to determine project cost performance and flag issues and problem areas in the organization.

A well-crafted work breakdown structure can keep your team humming along like a well-oiled machine with these benefits:

• Improves productivity
• Helps project managers predict results based on various scenarios
• Helps with project organization
• Assists in describing the project scope to stakeholders
• Helps to distribute responsibilities
• Allows correct estimation of costs, risks, and time
• Increases communication
• Enables more creativity and brainstorming
• Focuses on end goals
• Organizes details
• Potentially prevents problems
• Addresses scheduling issues
• Helps manage risks
• Allocates tasks
• Gives teams flexibility
• Eliminates confusion
• Gives every team member clear task descriptions
• Helps write and support the statement of work
• Provides foundation for clear status report on project, since each work package is a measurable unit

What Are the Key Components of a Work Breakdown Structure?

A reliable, useful work breakdown structure or dictionary should gather the critical elements of a project, along with its timeline, cost, and resources. The most helpful WBS plans contain these components:

• Identification of which organization, department, or individual is responsible for each specific work piece
• The scheduled start and end dates
• Required resources
• Estimated cost of the project
• Charge numbers
• Contract details, requirements, and milestones
• Protocol for quality control, requirements, and standards
• Technical information and resources needed to achieve desired results

At a higher level, the WBS can also serve directional and organizational roles. A thorough WBS plan can act to:

• Help human resources manage team assignments
• Manage the schedule and determine the project timeline
• Manage and measure the quality
• Anticipate enterprise environmental factors
• Identify organizational process assets
• Track version history
• Establish dependencies
• Track the overall progress of a project

Who Uses Work Breakdown Structures?

Business project managers use work breakdown structures to ensure an organized, visible view of their projects and their components. These teams can also benefit from using work breakdown structures:

• Client-Facing Groups: Account directors rely on work breakdown structures to demonstrate progress (or roadblocks) to their clients. A WBS creates a “north star” for a project’s deliverables and milestones, which in turn becomes a useful tool to show clients how things are going.
• Creative Groups: Everyone knows that designers, writers, content strategists, and other creatives need help in focusing their creativity. A work breakdown structure creates helpful guardrails to keep the ideas flowing in relevant, project-centric ways.
• Remote and Internal Projects Groups: The visibility of a WBS helps everyone involved, even tangentially, in understanding who’s doing what and when.
• Technical Groups: Technical teams can use a WBS as a roadmap for their development tasks. These teams often already are operating with visual “swimlane” or other architectural types of project management milestones.

In addition to agency and corporate settings, other fields rely on work breakdown structures:

• Commercial Project Planners: A WBS can capture all the moving pieces of a large commercial project — not just the main company’s projects and team members’ tasks, but those of vendors and subcontractors. It can also capture dependencies for getting necessary permits, tracking progress with governmental approvals, and more.
• Event Planners: A WBS breaks down a complex event into tasks and subtasks, and assigning them helps keeps multiple teams moving forward on tight deadlines.
• Residential and Construction Project Managers: In addition to the tasks and team members involved in a regular commercial project, construction project managers can use a WBS to track stages in utility work, zoning approvals, environmental approvals, and more.
• Scope Planning Managers: When an agency takes on a new client, the resource planners and directors need to have at least a rough view of the project timeline and resources needed before assigning a budget and scope to the project.
• Software Developers: Software developers often already break down their projects into phases or stages. A WBS that includes other organizational members helps developers stay on top of the most important deliverables first, while giving visibility to the rest of the team.
• System Engineers: System engineers are charged with owning the big picture of their setups and keeping them running and updated for optimal performance. A WBS gives them an organic document that captures the smallest details that map to bigger systems operations. Knowing they have that information at their fingertips can ease their minds by letting them focus on the larger operational questions.

Within an organization that already has a project plan or work breakdown plan in place over the long term, work breakdown structures are helpful for a predecessor on a project to see how the project has progressed during their absence. For successors on a project, the WBS helps them see both what worked and what did not in the project’s earlier days and to track dependencies and their outcomes. In short, anyone in an oversight role who needs to plan for the division of labor on a project can benefit from using a work breakdown structure.