The Work Breakdown Structure Defines The Scope of The Project

Introduction

When it is about meeting project's objectives it is very important to find and plan out how each activity will be developed and organized within the project's lifecycle. Over the years, project managers understood that they cannot manage, plan, organize, and control projects without a method or tool which breaks the project into more manageable pieces in helping them for capturing and controlling their project scope. The practice and experienced Project Managers had demonstrated that creating and developing a high quality Work Breakdown Structure to define the scope of the project will help ensure delivery of the project’s objectives and outcomes and also had pointed that the more clearly the scope of the project is articulated before the actual work begins, the more likely the success of the project.

Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)

The concept of work breakdown structure was introduced and developed for the first time by the United States Department of Defense (DoD) with the Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) and has been a fundamental component of the Project Management lexicon since. The work breakdown structure (WBS) is, quite simply, a method of identifying and classifying the work content of the project in a rational and easily understood way (Allan, 2003). WBS provides the foundation for defining work as it relates to project objectives and, also establishes the framework for managing the work to its completion (PMI, 2006). The WBS organizes and defines the total scope of the project and the PMBOK Guide - 3th Ed. defines the WBS as “a deliverable-oriented hierarchical decomposition of the work to be executed by the project team to accomplish the project objectives and create the required deliverables”. According to the PMBOK Guide and the Practice Standard for Work Breakdown Structures – 2th Edition (PMI), the work breakdown structure can be used to decompose the project scope, improve estimating, and control the project execution and to verify project completion.

Creating the Work Breakdown Structure

Developing a good WBS is crucial before starting the actual work on project and is the process of subdividing project deliverables and project work into smaller, more manageable components and the key benefit of this process is that it provides a structured vision of what has to be delivered (PMI, 2008). In other words, the WBS breaks down all the work required for the project into individual activities, grouping them into a logical hierarchy and making the project more manageable, facilitating other project management processes such as scheduling, estimating, resources allocation, risk analysis, measurement and control of the project. Most of the projects involve many people and different deliverables and WBS help to organize and divide the work into smaller and logical components based on how the work will be performed. In working for a project people often create first a WBS in a graphical format to get the help on visualizing the whole project and its main parts. WBS provides the framework for all the deliverables included in the project life cycle and structurally is based on levels. The top box, called level 1, represent the name of the project. The second tier of boxes, level 2, contains the main groupings for the work. The upper level normally include the major deliverable work areas of the project and provide the summary points for assessing team and individual performance and for measuring cost and schedule performance. Each of the boxes from the level 2 can be decomposed to show the hierarchy of the work. The lowest level of a WBS is called work package and typically provide appropriate focus for project management processes, talking here about scope and schedule development, resources allocation, cost estimating and risk assessment, and represent the level of work that the project manager monitor and control. A work package represents the level of work that the project manager monitors and controls (Schwalbe, 2012). Each descending level of the WBS represents an increasingly detailed definition of the project work. It is common for WBS elements to be numbered sequentially to reveal the hierarchical structure to provide a consistent approach necessary for identifying and managing the WBS.