Valutor Project Management

Work Breakdown Structure WBS

In Chapter 1, I pointed out that when faced with any large, complex system you should break it into manageable pieces. The Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) consists of the complete list of tasks and subtasks required to complete the program. The elements of a WBS are discrete tasks or work packages that can be separately planned and budgeted. Examples of WBS items might include "writing the test plan" or "user interface development."

Develop a WBS where most of the tasks are of three-months duration. Three months gives you adequate control yet the tasks are not so short as to be annoying.

The structure of the WBS should support both budget tracking and status reporting. Project management tools are designed to produce both items, along with a time-phased budget. Both budgets and schedules consist of WBS tasks: The schedule tracks the amount of time allocated to tasks; the budget tracks the cost. Consider the following criteria when developing your WBS:

Easily planned. Each task has a well-defined start and end.

Trackable. The tasks are useful as communications tools in reporting status, that is, accomplishment against expectation. It should be obvious to any interested party whether a task is in progress. Your staff members should be aware of which task they are on working on.

FOR FURTHER READING

A more detailed account of the theory and practice of work breakdown structures can be found in Harold Kerzner's excellent textbook Project Management, published by Van Nostrand Reinhold in 1998.

Specify a budget. Each task should have an associated cost.

Have the right level of granularity. If you have too many small tasks of short duration and small budgets, they become impossible to track. If your items are too large, they do not serve a basis for controlling costs and measuring progress.

To support your schedule and budget, maintain the WBS items in a hierarchical structure. The easiest way to display a WBS is as a tree, shown in Figure 4.2. The root of the tree represents the entire product or project. The next level might consist of major functions such as program management, development, maintenance, training, packaging, and shipping. Another approach is to have the second level consist of the product releases. In either case, the tasks are broken into smaller tasks to the level of granularity that works best for your organization.

'igure 4.2 WBS hierarchies.

The hierarchies should reflect your organization's budget-tracking method. Some organizations are concerned with what a release costs; others are concerned with how much an organization spends on the various functions. I prefer the product approach. If you build the WBS development tasks around this hierarchy:

Product releases

Builds

Phases

Packages then the tasks roll up meaningfully in your schedule and your budget. The schedule consists of the time spent on meaningful blocks of work: releases, builds, and lifecycle phases. This hierarchy is also valid in a budget since it rolls up the cost of each build and product release. It lets you track what a product costs to develop.

Table 4.6 shows how a WBS might be organized. The numbers represent the task's position in the hierarchy. The first decimal point represents the breakdown of the entire program into major subtasks. The second decimal point is the breakdown of the second level, into third-level subtasks, and so on. Figure 4.3 gives the tree diagram for the WBS given in Table 4.6 on page 144.

Figure 4.3 Recommended WBS hierarchy.

Table 4.6 A High-Level WBS

WBS # Task

1	Program (Product)
1.1	Initiation
1.2	Oversight
1.3	Development
1.3.1	Release 1.0
1.3.1.1	Build 1
1.3.1.1.1	Inception
1.3.1.1.2	Elaboration
1.3.1.1.3	Construction
1.3.1.1.4	Transition
1.3.1.2	Build 2
1.3.1.2.1	Inception
1.3.1.2.2	Elaboration
1.3.1.2.3	Construction
1.3.1.2.4	Transition
1.3.1.3	Documentation
1.3.1.4	Packaging and Release
1.3.2	Release 2.0
1.3.2.1	Build 1
1.3.2.1.1	Inception
1.3.2.1.2	Elaboration
1.3.2.1.3	Construction
1.3.2.1.4	Transition
1.3.2.2	Build 2
1.3.2.2.1	Inception
1.3.2.2.2	Elaboration
1.3.2.2.3	Construction
1.3.2.2.4	Transition
1.3.2.3	Documentation
1.3.2.4	Packaging and Release
1.4	Maintenance
1.5	Training

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