Work Breakdown Structure

Upon completion of this chapter, the reader should be able to: Describe several different WBS architectures; Describe the major approaches to constructing a WBS; Explain why a software WBS is needed; Explain how a software WBS is used in a software development project; Define what a WBS is and what milestones are; List and describe the steps to build a software WBS.

What Is a Work Breakdown Structure?

Simply stated, a WBS is a hierarchical list of the work activities required to complete a project. It will include managerial, administrative, integral, or developmental activities for: Doing the software development; Managing the project; Providing support for all of the project's activities; Any other activities required to meet the objectives of the project and the customer requirements, such as the creation of documents, training programs, tools for development, acquisitions, travel, and so on.

What Is a Work Breakdown Structure?

A WBS serves as a framework around which to build the project schedule. It helps you move from the top-level activity of the project (the do it activity) down through a set of simpler, smaller activities designed to build the software product deliverable, until the activities become small enough to manage well. It helps everyone understand the relationships of tasks and activities to each other in an illustrated way. It helps ensure that all the work is represented and that no work steps have been omitted. It also helps the project team divide the work to be done into small, well-defined tasks and activities. Of course, the WBS also facilitates planning, estimating, and scheduling, and it is a basis for monitoring the project and for historical data collection.

What Is a Work Breakdown Structure?

A product-oriented WBS contains process steps to build the product, organized around the product components. It drives the planning for the what and how steps, and provides the foundation for tracking of work activities, cost, and schedule in the do it step by giving the engineer or manager a global view. It is the "table of contents" for the work of the project. As such, it is an indispensable tool for the project manager.

What Is a Work Breakdown Structure?

Specifically, we need the WBS for the following three project activities: 1) Cost estimating To make sure that all activities get estimated; To make sure that each element of the estimate corresponds to a necessary activity; To "roll up" costs of individual elements into total costs for subelements and for the system as a whole. 2) Cost accounting To assign work and "charge it" to appropriate cost centers based on specific WBS elements; To determine the actual cost of each element. 3) Schedule performance To monitor which activities are complete; To measure project progress.

WBS Relationship to Cost Control

The WBS can be related to cost accounts created for a project to control costs, and to the organizational breakdown structure created (or perhaps inherited from a parent organization) to manage the work. The WBS can map these together with a specific scheduled work item after the schedule has been built. On a large software project, this provides a cost basis for how much each piece of the final software system will cost to build, which is an important factor to pass on to future estimators of similar software products.

WBS Relationship to Cost Control

Work breakdowns can be described in a number of different ways. An example of a common WBS viewed as a tree is shown in Fig. The tree view is most useful for high-level breakdowns of the work in the why and what steps of the project process framework.

Another representation for a WBS usually seen when the project planning gets detailed in the how step is as an indented list. The indentations indicate the hierarchy as the levels do in a tree view. This is an excellent way to view the hierarchical structure of the work, when the work involves a lot of activities. Most people can readily relate to an outline format. Large indented lists are easily managed with a simple spreadsheet, permitting sorting in a variety of ways (by WBS code, responsibility, start date, etc.). Most project management scheduling tools can show the WBS as an indented list, but few show it as a tree.

WBS Views
A WBS may be created for the two most common views of the project: A product view depicting hierarchical relationships among product elements (routines, modules, subsystems, etc.). But don't confuse this with a bill of materials. A project view depicting hierarchical relationships among work activities (process elements). This is often divided along organizational lines.