Project Management Tips and Techniques - Work Breakdown Structure
Tom Mochal

Each month, Tom Mochal presents a set of project management tips and techniques for handling various aspects of planning and managing a project. Tom has developed a number of comprehensive, scalable methodologies, including a project management process called TenStep (www.TenStep.com). Tom also published a popular book called Lessons in Project Management. 

The best way to build a workplan for your project is to reuse the workplan of a similar project that was completed successfully. However, if you do not have a similar workplan to use as a model, you may need to build the workplan from scratch. The best way to do this is through the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). The general process is as follows:

1. Gather Pre-existing Baseline Documents. First review the Project Definition to ensure an understanding of what is to be produced, the overall timeframe, risks and assumptions, etc. The Project Definition may not be complete, but it needs to be in decent first draft form so that the draft workplan can be built.
    
2. Create a Work Breakdown Structure. Determine the large chucks of work that must be completed for the entire project to be completed. At this point, it does not matter how you define the large chucks of work. It is only important that all the work is identified at the end of the process. For instance, a traditional breakdown might be 'planning / analysis / design / construct / test / implement', which lays out the project in a high-level timeline. The breakdown could also be by deliverable - for instance 'online application / data warehouse / data marts / user query tools'. It could also be by some functional breakout such as 'extract data / load data / report on information'.
    
   Break down the work into whatever structure makes sense for your project. The initial high-level breakdown of work is called level 1. The point of the Work Breakdown Structure is to capture all the elements of work. Sequencing is not important at this time.
    
3. After you finish your initial breakdown of the work, do a quick estimate to determine whether any of the pieces require a work effort that is larger then the estimating threshold. (The estimating threshold is usually 80 hours of effort, but you can define it to be larger or smaller depending on the size of your project.) If you have a medium to large project, most of the first level of work is still going to be larger that the estimating threshold. Look at these large pieces of work and determine what activities are required to complete them. You can also break down work that is already less than the threshold. This gets you to level 2 of the Work Breakdown Structure. When the process is complete, again estimate the work of the second level activities to see if they are still larger than the estimating threshold. If so, then they need to be broken down further.
    
4. Continue to break down each step as above, until all of the work is represented as granularly as necessary, with no activities having an estimated effort larger than the estimating threshold. This takes you to level 3, 4, 5 etc. It should be a rare case where you would need to break the work down greater then five levels.
    
5. You have already done a high-level estimate of effort to determine if the work for each activity is greater than the estimating threshold. When the Work Breakdown Structure is complete, you need to review and provide a specific estimate of effort for all of the detailed activities. (The detailed activities are the ones at the lowest level that are not broken down further.)

Focus on Deliverables, Then Activities

Sometimes people have a hard time getting a WBS started because they are not sure what to put at the very top, and they are uncertain about how to break the work down from there. Although there are many ways that the WBS can be started, ultimately you want to focus on deliverables. If we assume that the top level is the overall project (level 0), then the next level can start describing the actual deliverables to be produced by the project. After the deliverables are described, the activities can be defined that are required to build the deliverables. The project plan is ultimately made up of activities, but they need to be developed in the context of completing deliverables. 

There are a number of options for defining the WBS at level 1. 

• It might make sense to place the major project deliverables directly at level 1, and break the deliverables into smaller components on the next level, if necessary. 
   
• Another option for level 1 is to describe the organizations that will be involved, such as Sales, Marketing, IT, etc. The next level should describe the deliverables that each organization will produce. 
   
• A third option is to look at level 1 in terms of the project life-cycle, for instance analysis, design, construction, testing. Again, if that is the best logical way to look at level 1, then level 2 should describe the deliverables produced in each life-cycle stage. 

You see that the top level can start with deliverables, or else start with another way to logically group major portions of the project. However, if you choose another way to initially organize your thinking of the project, you need to transition immediately from there to deliverables, and then move to the activities necessary to build the deliverables.

Each month, Tom Mochal presents a set of project management tips and techniques for handling various aspects of planning and managing a project. Tom has developed a number of comprehensive, scalable methodologies, including a project management process called TenStep (www.TenStep.com). Tom also published a popular book called Lessons in Project Management. 

Would you like to receive project management tips every week? Sign up for the weekly TenStep Project Management Tip of the Week at www.TenStep.com.