 What is a Work Breakdown Structure?

 A Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is used for breaking

down a project into easily manageable components, or bites.
Here we'll break down the process for you, making it easy to
use these structures in your project planning.
 Company owners and project managers use the Work
Breakdown Structure (WBS) to make complex projects more
manageable. The WBS is designed to help break down a
project into manageable chunks that can be effectively
estimated and supervised.
 Some widely used reasons for creating a WBS include:
 Assists with accurate project organization
 Helps with assigning responsibilities
 Shows the control points and project milestones
 Allows for more accurate estimation of cost, risk and time
 Helps explain the project scope to stakeholders
 Constructing a Work
Breakdown
Structure
 To start out, the project manager and subject matter experts
determine the main deliverables for the project. Once this is
completed, they start decomposing the deliverables they have
identified, breaking them down to successfully smaller
chunks of work.
 The Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is developed to
establish a common understanding of project scope. It
is a hierarchical description of the work that must be
done to complete the deliverables of a project. Each
descending level in the WBS represents an increasingly
detailed description of the project deliverables.
Structure example:
 Quality of a Work Breakdown Structures
 A well-designed WBS describes planned outcomes instead of
planned actions. Outcomes are the desired ends of the project,
such as a product, result, or service, and can be predicted
accurately. Actions, on the other hand, may be difficult to predict
accurately. A well-designed WBS makes it easy to assign elements
of the WBS to any project activity. A good WBS should show the
following characteristics:
 Definable—can be described and easily understood by project
participants.
 Manageable—a meaningful unit of work where specific responsibility
and authority can be assigned to a responsible individual.
 Estimateable—duration can be estimated in time required to
complete, and cost can be estimated in resources required to
complete.
 Independent—minimum interface with or dependence on other
ongoing elements (i.e., assignable to a single control account, and
clearly distinguishable from other work packages).
 Guidelines for Developing Work Breakdown Structure
 The development of Work Breakdown Structure involves subdividing
the major project activities or sub-activities into smaller, more
manageable activities until the activities are defined in sufficient
detail to support the management and development of project works.
The items at the lowest level of a branch are known as work
packages. Here are some tips in developing a Work Breakdown
Structure that can express works effectively:
 Always express Work Breakdown Structure activities at the lowest
level
 Review the Work Breakdown Structure. Make sure all deliverables
have been fully covered by the works defined in the Work Breakdown
Structure.
 Ensure that testing and training have been taken into account.
 Ensure that non-IT work packages are also included such as,
documentation and review activities are included in the structure.
 Different Forms of Work Breakdown Structure
 Generally speaking, there are three typical ways in
structuring works with a Work Breakdown Structure
(WBS). They includes phase-based structures,
deliverable-based structures and responsibility-based
structures.
Phase-based structures
Define and structure project activities based on
the project phases.

                                                                                      
                    
 Deliverable-based structures
 Define and structure project activities
based on the deliverables agreed to
deliver.
Responsibilities digram
 What is a Work
Breakdown
Structure Diagram?
 A WBS diagram expresses the project scope in simple graphic
terms. The diagram starts with a single box or other graphic at
the top to represent the entire project. The project is then
divided into main, or disparate, components, with related
activities (or elements) listed under them. Generally, the upper
components are the deliverables and the lower level elements
are the activities that create the deliverables
 Information technology projects translate well into WBS
diagrams, whether the project is hardware or software based.
That is, the project could involve designing and building
desktop computers or creating an animated computer game.
Both of these examples have tasks that can be completed
independently of other project tasks. When tasks in a project
don’t need to be completed in a linear fashion, separating the
project into individual hierarchical components that can be
allotted to different people usually gets the job done quicker.
One common view is a Gantt chart.
 Simple WBS
Examples
 Building a Desktop Computer - Say your company plans to
start building desktop computers. To make the work go faster,
you could assign teams to the different aspects of computer
building, This way, one team could work on the chassis
configuration while another team secured the components.
Creating an Animated Computer Game 
 – Now we switch to software project management, where you
startup a computer animation company. To be the first to get
your computer game on the market, you could assign teams to
the different aspects of writing, drawing and building animated
computer games. Perhaps your key programmer is also a pretty
good artist. Rather than have him divide his time and energy by
trying to do both tasks, you will realize faster results if the
programmer concentrates on programming
 The WBS provides the foundation for project planning, cost
estimation, scheduling and resource allocation, not to mention
risk management.
5.4 Create WBS (pg 126 PMBOK)
 Divide big task into smaller more manageable ones
 Deliverable oriented hierarchical decomposition
 Lowest breakdown is called “Work Package”
Methods of WBS creation

 By Phases
 By major deliverables
 By outsourcing projects work
Decomposition (pg 128 PMBOK)

 Easier to manage work packages

 Do not decompose excessively
 Not possible for deliverables far into the future-Rolling
Wave Planning