This helps avoid miscommunication and duplication of tasks. When it comes to planning a project, the work breakdown structure is one of the first things a project manager has to work on. To use a work breakdown structure effectively, it is important to include all components of a project (remember that 100% rule described above) but without too much detail.

One way to achieve this goal is to use nouns when adding elements to the WBS. That is, every element in the WBS should be either a noun or an adjective. While creating a work breakdown structure is technically easy (it’s just a flowchart or an Excel sheet, after all), it can be time consuming.

It integrates project scope, schedule, and cost baseline and ensures that all project plans are aligned. A scope of work is a comprehensive document that explains your project scope, which is all the work to be performed. A WBS is the perfect tool to break down the scope of a project into work packages that are easier to control. On top of that, a work breakdown structure allows you to easily identify milestones, deliverables and phases. The phase-based WBS displays the final deliverable on top, with the WBS levels below showing the five phases of a project . Just as in the deliverable-based WBS, the project phases are divided into project deliverables and work packages.

Must-Have Features of WBS Software

It’s common to have three levels of decomposition in the WBS. You might have a fourth and even a fifth level in case of extremely complex projects. The work breakdown structure can be confusing, especially for new project managers. Despite its name, it doesn’t actually involve breaking down work; it involves breaking down deliverables. In Joe’s case, it’s a picture or drawing of what the house will look like when it’s finished.

• The lowest Levels of each Leg and Branch of the WBS are called Work Packages.
• It helps you find project costs, develop schedules, and monitor and control project work.
• Continuously breaking down your structure into more reasonable and measurable work packages depend on the type, size and complexity of your project.
• Creating a work breakdown structure can be a daunting task.
• If there is some ambiguity in names, you must clarify this in the WBS Dictionary.

It also helps project managers communicate information regarding a project budget and timeline to key stakeholders, including the individuals and teams involved in the project. Finally, by breaking down the project into smaller components, a WBS integrates scope, cost and deliverables into a single tool. The WBS meaning here is as a form of project planning methodology. A WBS dictionary defines the work scope for each element in the WBS. The WBS is used as the basic building block for the planning of all authorized project work.

When to Use a WBS?

Facilitates the tandem completion of different and unrelated tasks or work packages, which improves productivity. The duration or budget of each task can be accounted for to get a near-accurate estimate for the entire project. Assists in clearly defining the project scope amongst the stakeholders while also mitigating scope creep. Educational Guides Guides and tools to unlock better work management. Get all our templates, tips, and fresh content so you can run effective, profitable, low-stress projects in your agency or team. Any further than that and you’re looking at a project that’s likely too complex .

If WBS is not well controlled for larger projects, the scope of work can be duplicated. To develop a WBS, you must have a complete and detailed scope of work. In many cases, you don’t have these details at the beginning of the project, so developing the WBS is not easy. Some people may find it difficult to develop a hierarchical-based Work Breakdown Structure, which is an additional task for them. You will avoid duplication of tasks and scope creep as it clarifies the scope of work. A sound Work Breakdown Structure helps you avoid many issues, such as scope creep, gold plating, cost overrun, and schedule delays.

What is Work Breakdown Structure?

Also, more complex projects can extend downward with more subtask levels. These can all be kept in a WBS dictionary sorted by milestones and overall project scope. There are several ways you can create a work breakdown structure. The lowest tech options are a whiteboard or a wall with sticky notes, but that clearly won’t work for a geographically dispersed team. Go digital with project management software that drives agility across teams, whether in the same room or distributed across the globe. It is the basis of your project planning and helps you identify all project components to find the project cost and develop the schedule accurately.

But if you want the WBS to integrate with the rest of your project documents, the best source of templates is your project management software. Creating a WBS is the first step in developing a comprehensive project schedule. It can be of massive help in getting everyone to understand the project’s https://globalcloudteam.com/ scope and deliverables at different levels. While software development normally uses an agile approach like Scrum, you could have a high-level WBS plan as well working in hybrid with agile at the granular level. Perhaps the planning of a new software feature takes a phase-oriented style of WBS.

The WBS is organized around the primary products of the project instead of the work needed to produce the products . Since the planned outcomes are the desired ends of the project, they form a relatively stable set of categories in which the costs of the planned actions needed to achieve them can be collected. A well-designed WBS makes it easy to assign each project activity to one and only one terminal element of the WBS. The WBS may be displayed horizontally in outline form or vertically as a tree structure . A work-breakdown structure element may be a product, data, service, or any combination of these.

Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) In Project Management

I am Mohammad Fahad Usmani, B.E. PMP, PMI-RMP. I have been blogging on project management topics since 2011. To date, thousands of professionals have passed the PMP exam using my resources. WBS helps develop schedules; it provides all work required to complete the project in an orderly format. This is the most important WBS principle and says WBS must include 100% of the project work and capture all internal, external, and interim deliverables. This rule applies to all levels of WBS, meaning the sum of the work at the lower level must equal 100% of the work represented by the upper level.

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. Each descending level represents an increasingly detailed definition of the project work. The deliverable orientation of the hierarchy includes both internal and external deliverables. A WBS is the cornerstone of effective project planning, execution, controlling, monitoring, and reporting.

Why Use the Work Breakdown Structure?

The three largest elements of WBS Level 2 are further subdivided at Level 3. The two largest elements at Level 3 each represent only 17% of the total scope of the project. These larger elements could be further subdivided using the progressive elaboration technique described above. A Work Breakdown Structure includes the complete project work. Developing a WBS is an iterative process; you repeat it when new information is available or the scope changes. The other two elements of the scope baseline are the scope statement and WBS Dictionary.

Types of WBS Charts

If necessary, you can break down these work components further. For example, the work component ‘Instagram’ can have copywriting, video editing, and graphic designing definition of work breakdown structure as its sub-components. A grouping of individual work items, components, or subassemblies, with appropriate quantities, to provide a basis for cost estimating.

There are 5 stages in the project life cycle, initiation, planning, execution, monitoring and closure. Each of them produces deliverables that are required to produce the final deliverable, which is the completion of your project. Work breakdown structure software is used to outline a project’s final deliverable and define the phases that are necessary to achieve it. Your project goals and objectives set the rules for defining your project scope.

If the work breakdown structure designer attempts to capture any action-oriented details in the WBS, the designer will likely include either too many actions or too few actions. Too many actions will exceed 100% of the parent’s scope, and too few will fall short of 100% of the parent’s scope. The best way to adhere to the 100% rule is to define WBS elements in terms of outcomes or results, not actions. This also ensures that the WBS is not overly prescriptive of methods, allowing for greater ingenuity and creative thinking on the part of the project participants. For new product development projects, the most common technique to ensure an outcome-oriented WBS is to use a product breakdown structure.

Ideally, your decomposition should stop before you can use verbs to describe the element. For instance, if you’re building a bicycle, “wheel rim” should be the final level since it describes a deliverable. If you decompose further, you’ll have activities related to the deliverable such as “buy steel”, “shape steel”, “make holes for wheel spokes”, etc. A common mistake when creating work breakdown structures is to keep the level of detail either too broad (i.e. too few levels) or too narrow (i.e. too many levels). Like Goldilocks, there is a level of detail that’s “just right”.

His project is to build the structure, not do the landscaping. Let’s look at a simplified WBS that Joe uses for building a house. Some of the links that appear on the website are from software companies from which CRM.org receives compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site .

Makes it Easier to Estimate Staff, Time & Cost

Follow the steps in this guide and make use of the templates to simplify your WBS process. The first step in creating a work breakdown structure is to clearly establish the project. For other projects, it might require refining the actual scope of the project so that the WBS is scaled appropriately and doesn’t become unwieldy. You can choose different WBS formats, such as the text-based hierarchical structure with numbers and decimal points. Alternatively, you can use a table-based, or organizational chart.

For example, if you’re building a bicycle, a “bike seat” might be one of your deliverables. All the work required to create the seat – cutting leather, shaping foam, creating metal frame, etc. – would be part of the work package. This is the oft-quoted “100% rule” – that the sum of the work at each “child” level must be 100% of the work at the “parent” level.

Once you’ve made the work breakdown structure, share it with your team. Use it to get a high-level overview of the project’s progress. The simplest way to do this is to create text-based hierarchical groupings. By convention, you use numbers and decimal points to indicate the level of the element. You don’t necessarily need a WBS dictionary, especially if the project is simple or limited in scope. For complex projects with a lot of churn, however, the dictionary can greatly improve clarity.