How does wbs work

Our main campus is situated on the Haldimand Tract, the land granted to the Six Nations that includes six miles on each side of the Grand River. Our active work toward reconciliation takes place across our campuses through research, learning, teaching, and community building, and is centralized within our Indigenous Initiatives Office.

A WBS is the cornerstone of effective project planning, execution, controlling, monitoring, and reporting. All the work contained within the WBS is to be identified, estimated, scheduled, and budgeted. It is a hierarchical description of the work that must be done to complete the deliverables of a project. Each descending level in the WBS represents an increasingly detailed description of the project deliverables. Here is a Work Breakdown Structure example:. A well-designed WBS describes planned outcomes instead of planned actions.

Outcomes are the desired ends of the project, such as a product, result, or service, and can be predicted accurately. Actions, on the other hand, may be difficult to predict accurately.

A good WBS should exhibit the following characteristics:. The development of Work Breakdown Structure involves subdividing the major project activities or sub-activities into smaller, more manageable activities until the activities are defined in sufficient detail to support the management and development of project works. The items at the lowest level of a branch are known as work packages.

Here are some tips in developing a Work Breakdown Structure that can express works effectively:. They includes phase-based structures, deliverable-based structures and responsibility-based structures.

Project Business Automation Quick Guide. What is Estimate at Completion? What is Project Overhead? Project Budget Templates vs. Models What is the PMO? Subscribe Keep up with the latest in Project Business. Subscribe to our newsletter below. Follow us. This website uses cookies to improve user experience. What is a Work Breakdown Structure? Gather Critical Documents Gather critical project documents.

Identify Key Team Members Identify the appropriate project team members. Analyze the documents and identify the deliverables. Decompose Breakdown Elements Begin the process of breaking the Level 1 deliverables into unique lower Level deliverables.

Continue breaking down the work until the work covered in each Element is managed by a single individual or organization. Ensure that all Elements are mutually exclusive. Ask the question, would any additional decomposition make the project more manageable? The descriptions should include information such as, boundaries, milestones, risks, owner, costs, etc.

Export or enter the Work Breakdown Structure into a Gantt chart for further scheduling and project tracking.