Hint of the Month - November 2023

What is the WBS in project management?

 

 

The WBS stands for the Word Breakdown Structure, and it's used in planning the scope of projects as a step leading to developing the project schedule. The purpose of the WBS is to decompose the project scope of work into smaller packages that are more manageable, and easier to plan and decompose further into lists of activities to create the time schedule. The value of the WBS is more visible in larger projects, where the scope is extended, while in smaller projects the WBS creation step is sometimes skipped and the time schedule with activity list is created directly. Usually the WBS is depicted in the form of a multi-layer tree shape, with the root being the project name, and subsequent levels are step-wise breaking of the scope into sub-categories, so that the leaf nodes in the lowest level are the final work packages from which the lists of activities are created. Number of levels and depth of decomposition should be proportional to the project size and not overly complicating.