Training program work breakdown structure

Conference Paper Work Breakdown Structures The work breakdown structure WBS is a foundation tool for effective project management and yet its creation is often undertaken without appropriate team involvement or buy-in. The scope of a project and the totality of the work are defined in the WBS, and failing to do so early can result in rework, schedule impacts, resource misallocations, and budget increases.

Moving the WBS creation to the beginning of the project, even as early as the team kickoff, and involving the whole team can have a noticeable impact in decreasing the risk level of your projects and increasing your chances for success. Adopting an effective WBS creation methodology can refine your requirements gathering and accelerate some early team building. It also has the added bonus of shortening the process and engaging the team in the work, which will lighten the load on the project manager.

These and other benefits of a good WBS remedy some of the top reasons given for project failure—poor project management methodology, poor requirements, misalignment of team expectations, poor change control, and inadequate schedules and budgets. This paper will discuss some key WBS concepts from the Project Management Institute's PMI work breakdown standard and lay out a practical methodology used successfully for creating a WBS by facilitating the early involvement of the project team.

Any discipline you put around this process will improve the quality and usefulness of the WBS in your project planning, which should enhance the overall quality of your projects. This paper is based on the practical experiences from our company program to improve the capabilities of our project managers and provide them with practical training, tools, and techniques that can be immediately applied to their projects.

As part of our adoption of PMI's methodology, we adopted the premise that time spent on creating an effective WBS early will pay dividends later in a project. Every project has a WBS, just like they all have schedules and budgets. They aren't always well done or even written down, but every project manager has some idea of what they are doing, how long they think it will take and how much they think it will cost. Clearly, without some discipline around refining these project planning deliverables, it will be hard to manage the triple constraints of your project, and this will limit your ability as a project manager to ensure the success of your project.

These additions validated the work done to improve the quality of our WBS and expand its use as a driver for the fundamentals in the project plan. Our approach was to develop a straightforward and easily implemented training course to improve understanding of the WBS for all project team members and to build the capabilities of our project managers in using a structured and more standardized approach to the WBS in overall project planning.

This approach would serve as a teambuilding exercise on individual projects, while building our bench strength for future projects. This approach ultimately centered on two activities:. The following sections of the paper will lay out the details of this approach and give you some of the content we have worked into our program.

If your organization can benefit from some added discipline in the application of the methodology, then hopefully this paper will provide a framework you can adapt to your organization if improving the quality of your WBS will improve your project management capabilities.

One of our early findings in inconsistent project management methodology implementation was that WBS creation and usage was not clearly understood by most members of our project teams and even some of our project managers. The skill level of the project manager was usually the determining factor in how well the summary tasks aligned with an acceptable WBS. To close this gap, one goal of our WBS rollout was getting to everyone working on a project the basic information on what constitutes a good WBS and how it is used in project planning.

This approach would reinforce some of the Planning Phase activities to get them a better WBS for their projects and feed the subsequent components of the plan; specifically the schedule, budget, and risk plan.

This introductory WBS class evolved into a one- to two-hour overview, which could be presented as needed in either a standalone format as part of our ongoing capabilities improvement curriculum, or customized to be included as part of a project kick-off or team exercise in an active project. Without going into too much detail on the content, which can be derived from the Practice Standard for Work Breakdown Structures PMI, , our course focuses on the following key points:.

A second finding that came out very quickly in looking at how our PM methodology was being rolled out was that most WBSs were being created by the project manager and presented to the project team as a fait accompli.

This was obviously at odds with commonly accepted best practices for involving those who will be doing the work in the planning of that work. This approach improves results by increasing the buy-in of the team in the project deliverables.

A component of our WBS class was to present both the team and the project manager with some techniques to facilitate everyone's involvement in the creation process. This was targeted to this process and not intended to be a full-blown facilitation class. Some of the reasons given by project managers for creating the WBS by themselves will give some insight into issues that need to be addressed in some of the pre-session facilitation. The reasons we commonly encountered did not yield a lot of surprises:.

You have to acknowledge it usually is easier to do some tasks yourself. The trick is to get people who are reluctant to delegate or involve the team to acknowledge two key findings: a group almost always produces a better result than an individual, and a loss of early buy-in by the team impacts productivity. Once we have agreement on 1, it is an easy sell to have the PMO teach the class. The Graphical Layout is my preferred method for developing a work breakdown structure.

We seldom do our best thinking when we are forced to think in a linear manner, such as when making a list in chronological order. With a graphical layout you can visually plot the tasks, starting with the highest level tasks, and layering in the sub-tasks as you go.

And the advantage is you can input the sub-tasks in random order, as they come to mind. The finished graphical layout looks like a hierarchical chart with the high level tasks distributed along the top or down the left hand side, and the sub-tasks arranged in layers underneath, or to the right.

An example of a simple two level work breakdown structure is shown above. The Outline layout shows the work breakdown structure as a vertical list, with each sub-level indented. It provides an easy way to view and understand the work breakdown structure. A simple two level work breakdown structure in outline format is shown at right. Examples of common elements are listed below: Integration, assembly, test, and checkout Systems engineering Program management Training Data System test and evaluation Peculiar support equipment Common support equipment Operational and site activation Industrial facilities Initial spares and repair parts Levels of a WBS Level 1: the entire defense materiel item, a program element, project or subprogram, for example, an electronic system.

Level 2: the major elements subordinate to the Level 1 major element. These major elements are prime mission products, which include all hardware and software elements.

Level 3: the elements subordinate to Level 2 major elements, including hardware and software and services. Lower levels follow the same process. Program WBS defines total program and is basis for measuring technical progress, planning technical reviews, and assessing cost and schedule performance.

Contract WBS defines that part of the program that is being produced by a given contractor and is the basis for collecting cost and schedule data for the contract. Please Provide Your Feedback Below. E-mail Address. Work Phone. Enter comments or questions below. Submitting feedback Determine the work package, which is the lowest in the hierarchy of your WBS.

The work package must be definable, independent, estimable, manageable, integratable, and measurable. Use nouns or adjectives to describe each work package. Decompose the project scope into a level 1 deliverable. Ensure all WBS elements are unique. Afterward, decompose the level 1 elements into level 2 and level 3, ensuring all sub-elements are unique and have a unique identifier.

Stop when you think you cannot go any further. The elements in the lowest level of the WBS are known as work packages.

There should not be an overlap in the scope of two different WBS elements at the same level. If there is some ambiguity in names, you must clarify this in the WBS Dictionary. It helps you understand the project team and the work package better. A WBS dictionary can have the following details: work package name, risk , assumptions and constraints , work package ID, work package description, name of the assigned team member, estimated cost, duration, due date, etc.

To develop your project schedule, you will break down work packages into activities and develop schedules. This rule applies to an activity level as well.

The work represented by activities in a work package must be equal to the work represented by the work package. A WBS breaks down the project scope into manageable components to make it easier to plan, manage, and deliver. WBS is very helpful in project management.

It is a planning tool and clarifies the scope of work. It helps you find project costs, develop schedules, and monitor and control project work. WBS has great importance in project management. It provides clarity in the scope of work; you can identify all project activities easily, see the dependencies among the project tasks , avoid duplicate work, determine task duration, and calculate the budget for each work package.

A sound Work Breakdown Structure helps you avoid many issues such as scope creep, gold plating , cost overrun, and schedule delays. A WBS can be in any form. It is not necessarily just in chart form; it can be in graphical, Excel, and tabular view.

You can select the WBS based on your project requirements. Here you draw a hierarchical chart of WBS. This WBS structure is easy to create. Many beginners confuse WBS with project schedules.

Note that both are different and serve different purposes. You will know exactly what you need to complete to finish the project. On the other hand, the project schedule will provide you with detailed activities you need to carry out to complete the project. You can see all activities, their duration, milestones, critical path, etc.