Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)

June 8, 2014
Professor Aguilar
Internet Assignment#3
Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)
What is a Work Breakdown Structure? Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is a deliverable-oriented grouping of projects elements which organizes and defines the total scope of the project (Pinto pg.145). WBS is used for breaking down a project into easily manageable components, or bites. WBS breaks 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. A work breakdown structure is just one of many project management forms.
The WBS can be broken down into a six-level structure, each level becomes more detailed. The breakdown of details becomes more focused to ensure that all the work will be covered and accounted for. The six levels starting with least to most detail are, total program, project, task, subtask, work package, and level of effort. These levels help to keep order to make sure the breakdown is working correctly. The great advantage in terms for project commitment when the team members participate in the development. The lowest level of the breakdown will be their individual assignments. So it helps build commitment if they are involved in setting the acceptance criteria that will be their performance expectation. In any project work breakdown the deliverables-based with quantified measures that define success will work properly.
On 4pm.com it tells in the tutorial that a Work Breakdown Structure is not an to do list. A “To Do” list work breakdown structure does not give a project manager a foundation for clear assignments to the team, close tracking or tight scope control. These PMs think their work breakdown structure WBS should be a “To Do” list for the project so they can tell everyone everything they need to do. As a result their projects fail most of the time (Billows 2013).
On significant cross-functional projects, there is absolutely no chance that the project manager will think of everything. The result of these fallacies is that PMs produce project plans with hundreds or even thousands of tasks. Many of the task will have durations of a few hours or a few days. Would that level of detail give better control and lead to successful projects? To Do list approach does not give effective control, in fact, it interferes with the achievement of a successful end result (Billows 2013).
To Do list approach is hard to maintain. People have to report on many tasks which decreases the odds of receiving accurate and timely status reports with or without clerical support. Amid the pressure of on-going multiple projects, tracking can fall behind and may even be dropped because the amount of effort is too large. This may sound like a stupid and improbable situation but it happens with alarming frequency, even on large and important projects. The logic is, “No one is looking at all that detail anyway, so why spend all that time to catch up?
What are the strengths or advantages of a work breakdown structure? The WBS is at the heart of project management. It affects directly or indirectly almost all the processes that are performed after its creation. As part of managing the project,