Establishing a WBS, Baseline, EVM, etc.

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The importance of work packages to support the creation and use of the WBS.

'A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge' defines the Work Breakdown Structure ' WBS ' as 'a deliverable oriented hierarchical decomposition of the work to be executed by the project team to accomplish the project objectives and create the required deliverable s'.

The reasons for using a WBS in any project are:

1) It helps more accurately, exclusively define and organize the scope of the total project. The hierarchical tree structure is most common way to do it. It breaks the project deliverable at each level of the structure right to the more specific and measurable chunks.

2) Secondly it helps in assigning responsibilities, resource allocation, monitoring and controlling the project. It gives more correct idea to project team what has been accomplished within each of the deliverables. Further, it helps in making acceptable estimation of cost, risk and time for the simple reason that it allows one to work from smaller tasks back to the entire project level.

3) Thirdly it enables you to check the deliverables precisely with stakeholder ensuring that there is nothing missing or overlapping.

To start with the following inputs are required:-

i) The Project Scope Statement;
ii) The Project Scope Management Plan;
iii) Organizational Process Assets and finally
iv) As per PMBOK Guide ' Approved Change Requests.

The above will provide all the information needed by you and your team to create the WBS
These inputs should give you all the information you and your team needs to create your WBS.
Additionally, A) Work Breakdown Structure Templates and B) Decomposition tools will also be required.
Combining the inputs with tools give the following outputs

Finally, using these inputs and tools you will construct the following outputs:

a) Work Breakdown Structure
b) WBS Dictionary
c) Scope Baseline
d) Project Scope Statement (updates)
e) Project Scope Management Plan (updates)
f) Requested Changes - (PMBOK Guide).

The next important step is to assemble the key stakeholders along with your team for their expertise, experience and talent in the conference room to finalize the specifics of each deliverable.

Levels: 1) Project Title, 2) Deliverables for the project.

Now the stage is set to function under the rule 100%, which states that the first two levels of WBS includes 100% of all the work defined in the project scope statement and management plan including internal, external and interim.
The fact remains that WBS normally achieves 90 ' 95% despite a goal of 100%.

Work package?

Is the lowest level of the WBS without inclusion of activities and tasks? It has been commonly realized by all project managers, varying according different projects and measured by adopting the rule of 8/80 that is no work package should be less than 8 hours or more that 80 hours.

Decomposition is breaking down of deliverables in to consecutive smaller parts of the work to be completed so that a level of work can be realistically managed by the project manager and completed within the specified period by one or more team members.

The Post-It -Note Technique:

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