Knowing the high-level tasks
that make up your project is important, but big chunks like Build
Bridge, Hire New Staff, and Plan Grand Opening Party don't help when
you're trying to estimate costs, line up resources, schedule work, or
track progress. You need to get much more specific about the work all
this is going to take. The point of a WBS is to break down the work into
small enough pieces that you can:Improve estimates.
Smaller tasks are not only less intimidating, they make it much easier
to figure out how many people you need to perform each portion of work,
how long it'll take, and how much it'll cost.
Keep the team focused.
Because the WBS spells out exactly what's needed to achieve the
project's objectives, it acts as a checklist for the work on the project
team's plate. It also gently guides team members away from doing things outside the project's scope.
Assign work to resources.
When work is broken down into discrete tasks, it's easier to identify
the skills needed to complete the assignment. The project manager can
clearly determine who's responsible for what. Also, team members are
more likely to understand their individual assignments, which makes them
happy and helps keep the project on track.
On
the other hand, don't go overboard by dissecting work into miniscule
assignments. Productivity drops when team members keep switching to new
assignments, and your temptation to micromanage increases. (You'll learn
how to determine the appropriate size for a work package in the next
section.)
Keep the project on track.
Shorter tasks give you frequent checkpoints for tracking costs, effort,
and completion dates. Moreover, if tasks have strayed off course, you
can take corrective action before things get out of hand.
1. Breaking Down Work
Like
Goldilocks, you have to find the right size for the work packages—not
too big, not too small, but just right. Large work packages can be so
vague that team members aren't sure what they're supposed to do.
Moreover, your team could reassure you for weeks that a large chunk of
work is running smoothly, only to beg for a schedule-busting extension
just when you thought they'd be done. Too-small work packages, on the
other hand, carry all the disadvantages of micromanagement: excessive
communication, unending status reporting, lost productivity, and so on.
So how do you build a WBS with work packages that are just right?
Each
project is unique, so don't expect the same approach to work for every
project you manage. Identifying work can run the gamut from
invigoratingly informal to scrupulously methodical, depending on whether
you're planning a small project for a close-knit group or wrestling
with a multi-year, multi-vendor project. (Whatever the project, a
sure-fire shortcut is to borrow from existing sources, as described in the box on Borrowing a WBS.)
Even
with input from all the project's stakeholders, a blank WBS can be as
daunting as the first blank page of the novel you want to write.
Fortunately, several methods of developing a WBS let you learn—or even
borrow outright—from the ideas and work of project managers who've
walked this path before: Similar projects.
If you know of a project that's similar to the one you're working on,
the fastest way to create a WBS is to use one that's already finished,
whether it's stored in Project or another program. Be sure to check that
project's final schedule and its closeout documents to identify work that was added during that project's execution. Experienced resources.
If people in your organization (or outside consultants and contractors,
for that matter) have experience with your kind of project, they can
help flesh out a WBS or identify work you've missed. You can write up
the WBS as best you can, and then ask those folks to look it over. Microsoft Project templates.
When you install Project, you automatically get a set of built-in
templates for different types of projects, from technology deployments
to residential construction . If these templates don't meet your needs, Microsoft Office Online (http://office.microsoft.com)
and other websites offer hundreds of specialized Project templates.
Start with one of these templates to launch your WBS, and tweak it until
it fits your project like a glove.
|
A WBS has only two types of elements: summary tasks and work packages. The lowest level tasks in a WBS are work package tasks—hunks of actual
work that you assign to team members. Anything else in a WBS is simply
some level of summary of that work, which can nest to as many levels as
you need, as shown in Figure 1.
As it turns out, you can build a WBS from whichever direction you
prefer—top down, bottom up, or side to side—as described in the
following sections.
1.1. Building a WBS from the top down
As the name "work
breakdown structure" implies, the most common way to build a WBS is to
start with the entire project and break it down until you reach
assignable work packages at the bottom. The most common way to decompose
(that is, break down) a project is by the deliverables that you want
the project to produce and the milestones you want it to attain.
A project scope statement
usually lists a set of deliverables that the project's customer and
other stakeholders expect to receive. One of the best ways to identify
project work is to create high-level tasks for every deliverable. For
example, if you're planning the party of the century, you'd create
summary tasks for food, drinks, music, and the video you need to
blackmail your friends after the fact.
Once
you have these top-level tasks, you take another pass at decomposition
by identifying intermediate deliverables and critical milestones, like
completing the celebratory rum cake or finalizing the reservations for
all the party vendors. For each intermediate deliverable and milestone,
ask yourself what work it entails. For instance, the music requires an
audio system as well as a song list, so you add one task for renting the
audio equipment and another for building a playlist of songs on your
computer. Then, you simply repeat this process for each deliverable
until you have work packages that you can assign to your spouse, your
kids, the caterer, and other folks you hire. (See the box on Good Task Names for advice on naming tasks effectively.)
Once you complete your WBS, take some time to verify it. Make sure all the items
in the scope statement have corresponding work in the WBS, and look out
for work packages that don't support the scope. Add missing summary
tasks and work packages. If you think of a deliverable that isn't in the
scope statement, add the work to the WBS and revise the scope
statement. Keep in mind, though, that if you're doing projects for
customers, you probably need their approval to change the scope
statement.
The
better a task name conveys the work it represents, the less you have to
worry about whether team members are doing what they're supposed to.
Effective task names include a verb and noun—the action you want people
to take and the result you expect. Using
the present tense of a verb presents the task as a command or
directive. For example, "Write How-to Manual" clearly identifies the
type of work and which deliverable the work applies to. "How-to Manual"
alone doesn't tell the assigned resources whether they are reading,
writing, editing, or printing the manual. Unambiguous verbs help clarify
work. You can
help your audience interpret tasks by differentiating summary tasks,
work packages, and milestones with different grammatical forms: Because
summary tasks represent a series of activities that span time, change
the verbs for summary tasks to a gerund (a verb with "ing" at the end),
like "Moving Household Goods." Milestones
(which represent goals or states) typically have names that include the
deliverable and its state, such as "Steel Columns Fabricated" or "Steel
Columns Erected."
|
1.2. Developing a WBS from start to finish
Another
way to slice and dice a project is to identify what you have to do from
the beginning of the project until the end. This approach isn't all
that different from the top-down decomposition described in the previous
section, except that you decompose each branch of the tree until you
reach its work packages. Then, you go back to the top and work your way
to the bottom of the next branch.
This
variation on the top-down method is ideal when different teams or
groups work on a project. Once you identify top-level tasks, you can
assign their decomposition to the groups that do the work.
Tip:
Don't forget to include project initiation and management tasks in your WBS.
Sure, some of your work goes on behind the scenes without obvious
deliverables, but project management is essential to keeping projects
within budget and on schedule. Besides, project management does
have deliverables, since most customers and stakeholders sign off on
project plans and want to see status reports, documents, and
expenditures.
1.3. Constructing a WBS from the bottom up
Identifying
work packages and then organizing them into summary tasks usually works
only for small projects, but small projects occur often enough to make
this a popular approach. Whether you write tasks on sticky notes or type
them into Project, you and your team can identify every iota of work
you can think of. Then, you can head to a quiet spot to organize it into
higher-level tasks.
If
you're a team of one but tend to argue with yourself, asking another
person to act as a tiebreaker can save time and frustration. In most
cases, however, the problem is too many people with their own
unquestionably correct ideas about how to break down the project. You'll
end up changing your WBS's organization, rearranging summary tasks, and
revising work packages with little progress toward a completed WBS. Start
with a small group of renaissance folks—people knowledgeable in one or
more sections of the project and familiar with the overall goal. For
example, you could work with the managers of each department involved in
the project to craft the top two or three levels
of the WBS. Then, you can assign the decomposition of the lowest
summary tasks of this initial WBS to work teams that have experience
with the type of work involved. The party caterer can identify the food
tasks, say, and your brother-in-law can write up the tent-wrangling
tasks. |
2. When Is Enough Enough?
Most
people can keep track of up to five things at once, although stress and
age increase forgetfulness. If you're a juggler extraordinaire, you
might be able to absorb eight items, but, beyond that, all bets are off.
Between three and seven levels of summary tasks is ideal for a WBS that
audiences can digest. For example, you can divide the entire project at
the top level into phases like defining requirements, designing
systems, and developing components. Then, within each phase, you can
create lower levels to identify work in more detail.
For monster projects, though, you can exceed the level limit without losing focus by breaking
the behemoth into subprojects. If the overall project is building a new
jet, you can have a few levels of decomposition to reach a set of
subprojects, each of which contributes major deliverables (engines,
fuselage, electronics, and so on). Then, separate WBSs
for each subproject can include their own three to seven levels. When
vendors or subcontractors perform subprojects, ask them to develop the
WBSs for their subprojects.
Tip:
If you have a bunch of folks helping you create the WBS, see the box on Too Many Cooks Can Spoil the WBS for advice on working together effectively.
As
with almost any endeavor, the last 20 percent is the most difficult.
The first several levels of the WBS might appear almost effortlessly,
but then the decomposition can slow to a crawl as you try to decide
whether something represents a work package or not. Here are some ideas
for how to decide what constitutes a work package:
To estimate work.
When you break tasks down into work packages based on the work you know
how to estimate, figuring out the overall project is as easy as adding
up estimates for all the chunks. For example, you may not have a clue
how long it will take to deploy Windows 7 throughout your organization,
but you know that it takes 3 hours to install and reconfigure one
computer.
To track progress. One rule of thumb for defining
work packages is to keep task duration between 8 and 80 hours (in other
words, anywhere from one workday up to two work weeks). These durations
also give you early warning when tasks overrun their estimates. In
addition, if you break work down into durations no longer than the time
between status reports, you're likely to have concrete progress to
report. The downside is that you need a clear idea of how long various
tasks take, but this approach works well for projects similar to those
you've performed in the past.
To maintain focus.
Guidelines aside, simply decompose work to the level of detail that you
can handle. If you're a keep-things-simple type, you can keep your WBS
at a high level and let team leaders manage details. On the other hand,
if you can remember details the way a Starbucks barista remembers coffee
orders, you can break down the work to your heart's content. Just
remember that dividing work into portions that take less than a day can
reduce productivity and morale (with certain exceptions, as discussed in
the box on When Short Is Sweet).
Most of the time, you don't want to break down your WBS
into tasks that take less than a day. Most people can handle a task
like sending out invitations without reporting back to their boss after
they buy the postage stamps. But suppose your project's goal is
replacing a mission-critical software system. When it's time to flip the
switch to the new system, you probably have only a few hours or even
minutes to make the change. That's when you need a detailed plan with
short work packages for the crucial period.
Fortunately,
situations like this are few and far between. But here's an example:
You spend months preparing for the changeover with work broken into
day-or week-long chunks. However, for the work that has to be done over a
single night before the staff starts coming back to work in the
morning, you can create a subproject that breaks work down into
minute-by-minute packages. These miniature work packages help you line
up the people you need (because you won't have time to call them in at
the last minute) and spot potential delays.
