Hello Everyone Work breakdown structure, is a well-defined technique to plan the work for the team, creating a WBS is also a brainstorming exercise to come up with the final list of deliverables. Having the full list of activities to be performed, it becomes easy to distribute them to team members based on their capability and have their time utilized well. The team members are also well sorted with this technique, they know how much work they have to perform, and provide the status of activities to put them in Status Report. With WBS, The activities are tracked well, Project Manager get to know how much work is completed and how much is pending, this data boils up to give you the big picture of how much more effort is required to complete the requirement.
Stay on top of it, you are one step near to crack the project manager inside you. Keep Reading!!!
Let me start with an interesting story on Project Management,
And it goes like this, Project Manager John is newly assigned to a project for Mr. Smith which is already started for about a month now and John has planned a meeting to meet the team members and get the activity status.
One fine morning, there was a standup meeting organized by John, Everybody in the room were excited to come to office and head start with the work. John greeted everyone and started with the brief like this –
“Thank you everyone for taking out your time and joining this meeting. My Name is John, and I am the newly assigned Project Manager for the project we are doing for Mr. Smith, so we are meeting today to get the status of your activities. Shall we start?”
And Imagine what happened, Everybody’s faces in the room were numb, nobody had a clue about this, 1 of Team Member stood up and ask, Sir, what activities? John said “I mean the activities that you are doing on the Project for Mr. Smith”
Team member asked, Sir, but we don’t know where the activity list is and, we don’t really know who is doing what? In fact, today, most of us are meeting for the first time with each other. Now, Surprised John have to identify what exactly the problem is? Let me ask you, What do you think? What step is missed out here?
Well, Keep thinking…
Ahhh, Let me give you a hint, In the last blog, if you have notice, in the status report template there was section about Highlights, in that section we covered, The Work Completed and The Work planned for the next reporting period.
Can you make a guess, from where the activities list come from? Well folks, It was nothing but the work break down structure which was missing in the Project for Mr. Smith.
Now, Let’s talk about What is Work Breakdown Structure.
Initially, any project will have only requirements given from the Customer. Further, those requirements are broken down into actionable items. And this technique is called as Work breakdown structure or WBS.
It is a technique to the plan the work to be done as part of the scope of the project, It is a decomposition process of requirement in to small chunks of activities.
There are 2 ways to look at it, Customer might give you the wholesome requirement or Customer might just give you the list of activities to be done. In the 1st scenario, you have been initially given a requirement and hence you are making that into small measurable activities, this is known as Top Down Approach to build the WBS. And In the 2nd scenario you have been given with list of activities to be done, which together performed to attain a single requirement, which is known as The Bottom up Approach.
In both the cases, the WBS is created along with the help of Subject Matter Expert in the project. The lowest level component in WBS is called as Work Package, Activity or a Task, or you can even have Work Package further broken down into Activities or Tasks, the granularity of WBS is decided based on the length and complexity of the project.
Let’s see how the WBS will look like.
In case of Top Down Approach,
You can plot the WBS in the form of a Tree Structure, where the requirement is mentioned at the top and the branches are coming out to define the different levels. The Levels are Modules and Sub Modules. And the final level is the task or activity.
The same can be created in the form of a spreadsheet, by creating a Table Structure. In this view, columns will be defined as various levels starting with Top level Requirements, having Middle level as Modules and Sub-Modules and lastly with Activities assigned to Resource. This is most common structure which is used in real world, because here you can more properties of activity such as Duration, Effort, Assigned To and So on and it becomes easy to maintain and track the activity completion.
And Lastly, in case of Bottom Up Approach, You can still use the Table Structure, but also can try the Building Blocks technique, where at first you have several pieces spreaded out (which are Activities in our case), and when they are stacked upon each other, it forms the desired shape (which is the requirement in our case).
So, I hope you got that now, What important step was missed in Mr. Smith Project. Now Let’s see what purpose can be solved with Work Breakdown structure in the next section of this blog
Work breakdown structure, is a well-defined technique to plan the work for the team, creating a WBS is also a brainstorming exercise to come up with the final list of deliverables. Having the full list of activities to be performed, it becomes easy to distribute them to team members based on their capability and have their time utilized well. The team members are also well sorted with this technique, they know how much work they have to perform, and provide the status of activities to put them in Status Report. With WBS, The activities are tracked well, Project Manager get to know how much work is completed and how much is pending, this data boils up to give you the big picture of how much more effort is required to complete the requirement.
It’s time for some Action Item:
For this exercise I suggest you to take a new project or a requirement in the existing project. Work with your SME and try to up come with list of activities. Stick to follow any one approach, either Top Down or Bottom Up. And finally once prepared, share the activity list with your team and customer for feedback and incorporate the changes as suggested by them. Remember, Feedback or review is very important, it aligns everyone to be on same page and make sure the list of activities are well understood by everyone.
Keep your list ready before next episode because the next one will be on scheduling technique, and this list will come handy with you.
So this was all about the Work Breakdown Structure. Thank you all, That’s all for this blog, Have a Great day, Bye Bye.
