What is a Work Breakdown Structure?

As a project manager, you should have a set guide for your team to complete a project. Project scope management is a way to get the project team and the stakeholders on the same page about the project’s scope and requirements. There are several parts to project scope management. In this blog post, I will break down the steps to creating the work breakdown structure (WBS). This will include what the WBS is, some approaches to developing a work breakdown structure, the WBS dictionary, and some helpful tips. Keep in mind that creating a work breakdown structure is done after you have collected all of the requirements for the project and defined the project’s scope. 

A work breakdown structure is “a deliverable-oriented grouping of the work involved in a project that defines its total scope”(Schwalbe). In other words, the WBS is a deliverable that is helpful to project managers by breaking down the scope and tasks of the project in an organized way. You may be wondering ‘Why is this important to project managers’? For starters, this document can help to keep things logical, and in order, and easier to complete the project. It lays out the planning and managing of project costs, resources, changes, and project schedules. Also, creating a WBS is crucial because it defines the entire scope of the project.

Work Packages

A large part of the work breakdown structure are work packages. Work packages are the tasks on the lowest level of the WBS. “That’s because a work package is a group of related tasks that are small enough to be assigned to a team member or department”(Project Manager). The top levels are there as summaries of the tasks in the packages. Think of this as a way for you as a project manager to monitor and control the amount of work you are overseeing. Depending on the complexity of the work, there can be more levels and breakdowns. Work packages can aid in reporting and accountability in this sense. Some tasks may take a week, a month, or longer to report on. The project manager and project team decide how the work will be organized and how many levels are needed in the WBS. Developing a good WBS can be challenging. Therefore “you must understand the project and its scope and incorporate the needs and knowledge of the stakeholders ”(Schwalbe). I strongly recommend having multiple group meetings about the project, creating and reviewing the WBS, and understanding the work that has to be done, how it should be done, and how everyone is involved. 

Some Approaches 

When you are creating a work breakdown structure, there are several approaches that you can take. 

• Using  guidelines

• The analogy approach

• The top-down approach

• The bottom-up approach

• The mind-mapping approach

As stated before, some organizations have specific guidelines for creating a WBS. Of course these guidelines have to be followed. Most organizations will give you a template and example WBSs. Guidelines, templates, and examples should be reviewed for a project before and during the team meeting to create a work breakdown structure. The analogy approach is where you use a WBS from a similar project as a starting point. There are some organizations that keep project documentation files, like a WBS, in a repository for you to browse. It can help you learn different ways to make a WBS and start thinking more creatively for your own. 

Next up are the top-down and bottom-up approaches. The top-down approach is when you “start with the largest items of the project and break them into subordinate items” (Schwalbe). By using this approach, you are subdividing the work into more detail. You should use this approach if you think from a big-picture perspective and have extensive technical knowledge. The bottom-up approach is the opposite to top-down. The team will first think of the most specific and detailed tasks of the project. Those are then put together into summaries for the higher levels on the WBS. This approach is very effective when creating a WBS but it is time-consuming. 

Lastly, there is the mind-mapping approach. Instead of writing out tasks in a list, there are branches that stem from the main idea. It allows people to draw pictures and write out thoughts and ideas more freely without the initial worry about a linear structure. You can easily add more branches and subcategories  or make multiple maps for each deliverable. After everything is written or drawn out, you can use the mind map(s) to form a larger map and convert it into tabular form or a chart.

WBS Dictionary and Helpful Tips