From the course: Project Management Foundations

What is a work breakdown structure?

From the course: Project Management Foundations

What is a work breakdown structure?

“

- [Instructor] After you get the go ahead to plan your project, the first thing you do is identify the work that has to be done. Even small projects can have lots of tasks. That's why project managers use a diagram called a work breakdown structure, or WBS, to organize work. You use it to divvy up project work into manageable pieces so you can plan, track, and manage your project. Creating a WBS helps manage the project in several ways. First, it's easier to estimate time and cost for smaller chunks of work. Say the sponsor wants to know how long the whole project will take. You can't come up with a good answer off the top of your head. It's a lot easier to think about how long smaller parts of the project will take. After you estimate the small chunks, you can add them up to get an estimate for the entire project. It's also easier to assign work to team members. By breaking work into smaller pieces, you'll have built-in checkpoints to measure progress on the project. A WBS contains two kinds of tasks; summary tasks and work packages. Summary tasks are the higher-level tasks that summarize work in some way. Summary tasks describe parts of the project. They could represent phases, or deliverables, or even work done by different groups in your organization. In our scheduling project, the WBS is organized by deliverable. How many levels of summary tasks depends on the size of the project. A few levels are enough for a small project. If a project is large or complex, you might have several levels of summary tasks. Work packages are the lowest level tasks in the work breakdown structure. They spell out lowest level project deliverables, and the detailed work needed to deliver them. In the scheduling project, the summary task to configure the system server might have work packages to activate modules, set options, and add software links. Breaking your project down into manageable pieces helps you plan and manage your project effectively.

Contents