Description
Assignment 1: Work Breakdown Structure
Work Breakdown Structure
A Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is a decomposition of all the work necessary to complete a project. A WBS is arranged in a hierarchy and constructed to allow for clear and logical groupings, either by activities or deliverables.
Essentially, the WBS defines the what of the project. Everything you need to accomplish in the project is displayed in a single, easy to understand chart. The purpose of this chart is to break down complex activities into smaller, more management constituents.
A work breakdown structure defines all the things a project needs to accomplish, organized into multiple levels, and displayed graphically.
Characteristics of the WBS
- Hierarchy: The WBS is hierarchical in nature. Each child level exists in a strict hierarchical relationship with the parent level. The sum of all the child elements should give you the parent element.
- 100% rule: Every level of decomposition must make up 100% of the parent level. It should also have at least two child elements.
- Mutually exclusive: All elements at a particular level in a WBS must be mutually exclusive. There must be no overlap in either their deliverables or their work. This is meant to reduce miscommunication and duplicate work.
- Outcome-focused: The WBS must focus on the result of work, i.e. deliverables, rather than the activities necessary to get there. Every element should be described via nouns, not verbs. This is a big source of confusion for beginners to WBS.
Overview and Concepts
Students are going to work through a NON-IT work breakdown structure so that you will better understand how project work can be so thoroughly organized into levels and displayed graphically. Thus, we will use a scenario of planning a wedding, as it is likely you have attending a wedding.
Background
The wedding planning service will require the following:
- Attire for the Wedding Party
- Ceremony
- Reception
- Rehearsal Dinner
- Bridal Lunch
- Accommodations
- Transportation
Knowing that there is no single correct way to organize or depict the deliverable hierarchy legs on the WBS, there are a lot of ineffective ways to represent the deliverables. These guidelines should be followed to produce an effective WBS for the project:
- Use nouns, not verbs, to keep the focus on deliverables versus activities to create the deliverables
- Use a hierarchy structure to illustrate the relationship of deliverable for the scope of the project
- Build the WBS collaboratively with the people who will ultimately produce the project deliverables
- Ensure each WBS leg contains deliverables that are unique from deliverables in another leg we don’t want to repeat the same deliverable in each column
- Never make assumptions that stakeholders will naturally know that a deliverable element is part of the project even if it is not included in the WBS.
- Follow the 100% rule when drilling down through the levels of the WBS. The 100% rule states that every level of decomposition in the WBS must contain all of the deliverable elements, which represent 100% of its parent deliverable.
Projects that create a service as the outcome also have deliverables that need to be included in a WBS. Although the essence of the project solution is to put in place the services to be performed, there are specific deliverables that are associated with, or the result of, performing the services that are included in the WBS.
Instructions
Create a WBS of all the tasks necessary to complete this planning. The WBS graphic must make sense and represents everything that must be completed as part of the wedding.
Deliverable
Use Visual Paradigm to create the WBS. Please put your names on the file (Export as PDF) and submit your completed work onto Moodle. Software: https://online.visual-paradigm.com/diagrams/features/work-breakdown-structure-software/
Source:
https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/work-breakdown-
