We use the WBS to drive a host of project management activities such as risk management, quality management, communications management, time and cost management. We gather requirements at the beginning of our project planning phase because they are necessary for many other project management tasks.
We can gather our project requirements very simply or have a much more elaborate requirements process where we are tracing the originator of each requirement and tying it to their performance commitments.
The consequences include stakeholders any additional requirements every single week. This is the classic form of scope creep where we continue to add new features bells and whistles to the project. This process also substantially increases the project failure rate because the project manager is not given additional time or resources to fulfill those requirements and dust the project is late and over budget.
How to build the work breakdown structure |
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Step number |
Responsibility of |
Actions to take |
1 |
project manager and sponsor |
Finalize approval of the scope statement. Everything should be defined in objectively measurable terms |
2 |
project manager and stakeholders |
Decompose the scope into 4 to 7 objectively measurable deliverables. Each major deliverable should have acceptance criteria which allows us to objectively decide whether the deliverable has been produced or not |
3 |
project manager and team members |
Further, decompose the major deliverables down to the level of assignments for individuals that are generally 4 to 7 days worth of work. More capable individuals would get larger assignments and less experienced individuals would get smaller assignments |
4 |
project manager |
Develop a work package for each task in the work breakdown structure that will be assigned to an individual or contractor. The work package should contain information about:
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5 |
project manager and accountable team member |
Project manager and team member will be accountable for each task, meet to discuss the assignment. They identify the major positive risks and negative risks and the inputs the team member requires before he or she can start. |
6 |
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when the team member accepts the work package for task, the WBS is complete and the team can move forward with estimating and scheduling |
