WBS for Project Management

WBS, or Work Breakdown Structure, is a practical decomposition tool that, according to the PMI definition, creates a work breakdown structure, which is the process of breaking down project deliverables and project work into smaller, more manageable components.

It's the same principle as factorization, which is to take a project and decompose it according to certain principles; the project is decomposed into tasks, which are then decomposed into a single task, and then a single task is assigned to each person's day-to-day activities until the decomposition can't go on.

That is: project→task→work→daily activities

For the concept of work breakdown structure, I think we should focus on the following two aspects of understanding:

1.? Work Breakdown Structure targets deliverables rather than program activities.

2.? The Work Breakdown Structure contains a scientific set of logical structures and categorizations, rather than a descriptive structure of individual, discrete, chronologically discontinuous deliverables that are very rigorous through layers of containment relationships.

We need to focus on the following 3 issues when decomposing ?wbs?

1. Granularity of ?wbs?decomposition

One of the substantive ideas of ?wbs?is to reflect the implementation and clear delineation of project responsibilities during the project process. Therefore, the need for each level of wbs decomposition process takes into account the division of project responsibility and attribution, as far as possible, each of the lowest level of the node has a unique responsible person (or department) corresponds to.

2. wbs is the basis for project schedule/cost control

In actual management practice, there are often multiple decomposition methods for a project, and different decomposition methods have different focuses and are difficult to harmonize with each other. Therefore, we first need to understand the other role of the ?wbs? method, is to realize the project schedule/cost control basis, without this function, wbs in the specific activities do not have any special significance, just a memo of the work.

3. The status of wbs in the various phases of the project

Project planning phase: to clarify the scope of the project, is the basis of the project schedule/cost estimation

Project execution phase: to check the quality of the project, you can project schedule/cost joint control

Project end: the project performance measurement