Question

Project Work Breakdown Structures (WBS) play an important role when defining the scope of a project and developing a project schedule. Describe the purpose of a WBS, how you would develop one, and why it is so important to develop before creating a project schedule.

Your comments should be supported by research that you reference at the bottom of your post

Answer 1

One of the various project controls which can be used by an organization, is the Work breakdown Structure (WBS). In a WBS, the overall project gets segregated into various tasks which can be allotted to various resources. This helps in tracking the project behavior and overall status. Each descending level of the WBS represents an increasingly detailed definition of the project work.

WBS Dictionary is a document which is developed with the objective of giving detailed information about the project, its schedule and budget, the various constraints, assumptions and regulations which must be follows as well as the quality requirements and acceptance criteria of the customers. If the stakeholders are spread across the world, WBS dictionary can be used to find information relating to the legal constraints of relevant international locations.

The manager must lay down the WBS(work break-down structure) of the project and must allocate tasks to the project members. Each member will have ownership for specific tasks and it will be his or her duty to maintain the updated status of the same in the common project platform. In team meetings, the task owner will be required to share the updated status of his or her task and keep the entire team on the same page.

The structured way of developing a project plan is as follows:

• Project Scope and Objectives must be drafted based on the customer’s needs and requirements
• Milestones and Major deliverables of the project must be identified and highlighted
• A work breakdown structure (WBS) for the project must be developed
• Based on WBS and availability of resources, the project budget must be decided
• Based on WBS, task allocation must be done to the available resources. A responsibility assignment matrix (RAM) must be developed
• Comprehensive risk management plan must be developed based on various perspectives of the stakeholders
• Project must be executed
• Project monitoring must be done on regular basis to identify any kind of deviations and non-conformities

Lets understand the WBS comprehensively through a simple example of a software project to develop a website: