We take a look at a work

break down structure. What does it start to look like? Well we're gonna
build a house. We say for this house,
there are four buckets of things. What we wanna do is just figure out
what are the elements of our project. We're gonna break the big project
of the Golden Gate Bridge into some smaller pieces. Something we can
actually understand,
define, work with. So to put our house together, we have to
get the ground ready to put the house on. We have to do something with
bricks,
mortar, concrete. We have to do something of wood. That's going to
include everything. The frame of the house,
it's going to include the doors, the windows the cabinets in the house.
The wooden trim around the,
the floorboard. All the things that have to do with
wood are gonna be in that category and then finishing work will
include everything else. [INAUDIBLE] plumbing,
electrical work, anything in there. Everything that's gonna be done in
the house will be in one of these four categories. Now we can break that
down further. To see finer levels of detail
in this graphic view of the WBS, we go down a level. So now we're
gonna go down under masonry
where we have the footings, the piers, the exterior walls, and the
chimney. Everything that has to do with bricks,
concrete, mortar will be in one of those four areas. Gonna take a look at
a book project. This is a book project. We're gonna do a book project and
we're not just gonna write the book. This is everything from
concept to delivery. Everything from the initial book
proposal all the way through to book is sitting on someone's
coffee table in their house. These are all the details
under some of the categories. We'll put all of the details
under all of the categories. When we get done with this,
we see at the top level, we have the deliverables of the project. So we
have the product scope,
and then underneath that, we have the project scope,
all those little individual tasks. And together now, we have a detailed
picture of the total scope of the project. Let's look at an example of this.
We have a project. Deliverables underneath there. Sub-deliverables
under there. Sub-deliverables under some of those. We finally get all of
our
deliverables laid out here. And so this is the top level. These are the
things that this
project will actually provide. These are the products,
the services, the information, the results that will
come from this project. And then underneath each one of those
will have major groupings of work. And under those major groupings of
work, we will break down those
eventually into detail tasks. Project activities, detail tasks. Keep breaking
these things
down further and further and further to get to that detail task level. This
is still pretty high level. This is a picture of the scope of
the project at least at some level where we have all of the de,
deliverables across the top and then we have large groupings of work
under
each one of these deliverables to show us that there are some work we
have to do in this project. Each one of those will be broken down
further into project activities and further and further and
further levels down to detailed task. Here's an example we're gonna look
at. We're going to with
some specifics in here. The mental health system of Southwest
Virginia, we need to do a report on that. What's it look like? We have to
do some kind of an analysis
of current institutional care, current community based care. We have to
do a budgetary analysis and we
have to finally do a report on this thing. You'll notice that there's
some numbering on here. As we go down different levels, we start
to see that these numbers get longer. So, if we look at element number 3,
underneath there it has two elements, 1 and 2. So, if we look at 3.1, 3.2,
it means
that if we go up higher on the WBS, we look at element number 3, and
these
are the two elements underneath that. If we look at 3.1.1, 3.1.2,
it means that under element 3, way up there in the WBS some place,
underneath there, there's 3.1. And underneath that,
now we have two elements underneath that. So this is how the
numbering
systems works on the WBS. Here are all the deliverables for examining
the current state of mental
health in Southwest Virginia and coming up with a budgetary analysis of
how
money should be spent for those two areas. And then we'll start to put
some details
underneath some of these things. Some detailed tasks underneath the,
these things. Some, actually work packages that would
be broken down into further details. So, here we have a pretty high level
still of what this project is going to look like. There's a lot of work that's
gonna be involved here. A lot of people are gonna have to do
a lot of work to get this thing done. There are two other ways
to put a WBS together. One is at the top level
instead of deliverables. At the top level we put act,
groups of activities. A lot of times a project team thinks
more in, what's the work we have to do? And then, sometimes we can
put this
together as a phase based WBS too. What's the first phase, second phase,
third phase, we have phase, we have to do? So here's one that's
an activity based WBS. And all the different activities
that we might have to do instead of the deliverables. There's more
activities under this one. What happened to the deliverables? They're
still there but if you use
an activity based WBS or phase based, it's a good idea to keep your list
of
deliverables out and keep them clear. Cause they're still in here,
they're just not easy to find. Phase based WBS. A lot of times you see
one that looks like
this, design, test, build, implement. Here's one from one organization
that
provides products to, to other companies. And they say well first thing
we have to
do, is anybody gonna buy these things? So that's the business analysis.
Then they say, yeah, this looks like
it's something somebody will buy. So now they have a commitment to
do this. Then they develop this thing. They get ready for release and then
it's
finally they start selling this thing and commercialization of it. And then
they'll have some
other details underneath there. Levels 1 and 2. More detail underneath
there. And here we're getting very detailed. So again, this just, just
wanna show
you that we start at the top level. Big pieces break this down further and
further and further into finer
levels of detail as we move forward. How detailed are we going to get?
Stop at whatever level
you think is enough so that you can assign this
task to a person or a group. And they can go do this. A rough guideline is
4 to 40 hours. Nothing shorter than 4 hours. Nothing longer than 4, 40
hours. This is only a guideline. We look at DuPont for example. If they
build major production facilities,
you're gonna very rarely see anything on their, on their WBS that's
less than an 80 hour task. If you look at Duke Power in North
Carolina, when they go in to refurbish a substation, they have to get in
there and get that thing done rapidly. They have a lot of their tasks
broken
down into 15-minute increments. So do whatever works well for
your organization. We also can start to take a look
at the detailed costs of the human resource part of the project. This is our
first opportunity to see
what the, what's involved with the human resource part of the project
and
the costs for that. We can also use this
information a little later on, when we start to track the project. Track and
control the project. What does this mean? It means that for each one of
these tasks
that we've ended up with, we said okay, something has to happen here.
This work that has to happen. For example complete the initial sketches,
there's 210 hours worth
of work involved in that. How did we get that? We get that from the
people sitting
around that, that table with us, our project team. We have the experts on
this
project sitting around that table. They're gonna give us those numbers or
we can look at past history of similar projects we've had in
the organization, look at some hard data. There's number of ways
to get those numbers. And then we just say to do one hour of
that work, it costs so much money, so that will cost a little over
$12,000 to do that in one task. So this is the first place we can get
a detailed estimate on the human resource cost of the project. There's a
chart view and an outline view. This is the chart view,
this is the outline view. Any of you who use software Microsoft
project or any similar kinds of software, Primavera, any of the the,
the clones of any of those softwares. It's gonna start to look like this.
Here to see finer levels of detail,
we go down a level. And here to see finer levels of detail,
we indent. Either one is fine. You don't have to do both. This seems to be
a good planning tool and
communicating tool. This is probably a good view when
we're actually monitoring and controlling the project when the project
is underway during execution.