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Unit 3: Work Breakdown Structure

Deliverable Notes

The result of completing the work that makes up the activity is the production of a deliverable.
The deliverable is a visible sign that the activity is complete. This sign could be an approving
manager’s signature, a physical product or document, the authorization to proceed to the next
activity, or some other sign of completion.

Cost/Time Estimate

Each activity should have an estimated time and cost of completion. Being able to do this at the
lowest level of decomposition in the WBS allows you to aggregate to higher levels and estimate
the total project cost and the completion date. By successively decomposing activities to finer
levels of granularity, you are likely to encounter primitive activities that you have performed
before. This experience at lower levels of definition gives you a stronger base on which to
estimate activity cost and duration for similar activities.

Acceptable Duration Limits

While there is no fixed rule for the duration of an activity, it is recommended that activities should
have a duration of less than two calendar weeks. This seems to be a common practice in many
organizations. Even for long projects where contractors may be responsible for major pieces of
work, they will generate plans that decompose their work to activities having this activity duration.

Activity Independence

It is important that each activity be independent. Once work has begun on the activity, it can
continue reasonably without interruption and without the need of additional input or information
until the activity is complete. The work effort could be contiguous, but it can be scheduled
otherwise for a variety of reasons.

Notes You can choose to schedule it in parts because of resource availability, but you
could have scheduled it as one continuous stream of work.

3.4 Using a Joint Project Planning Session to Build the WBS

The best way to build a WBS is as a group activity. To create the WBS, assemble a facilitator, the
project manager, the core members of the project team, and all other managers who might be
affected by the project or who will affect the project. The important thing is to have the expertise
and the decision makers present in this part of the planning session who can give input into the
WBS. This exercise should be continuous. The steps to build WBS are as follows:
 The first step is for the whole planning team to decide on the first-level decomposition of
the goal statement. One obvious approach would be to use the objective statements from
the POS as the first-level decomposition.
 Once the first-level decomposition is developed, the team has two choices on how to
proceed:

 Without a doubt, the best way (from a WBS completion point of view) is to have the
entire planning team remain intact and complete the WBS together. Often that will
not work simply from the standpoint of it taking more of everybody’s time and also
tying up the time of several high-level managers more than in the second choice.

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