Work Breakdown Structure

What does this complicated term mean?

Well, let us explain. At the end of this article you will notice that it is only a complicated term with a very simple concept behind and extremely useful, not only in a project environment but most areas in a company.

Work breakdown structure, or simply known as WBS is a common term utilized by the main project execution companies and professionals to assist the project organization, execution and consequently improve the chances of success of the same. It is not used only as a working tool but as a communication tool as well. It improves the understanding, classification and control of the project scope.

In a project, the structure of the WBS will depend on which party are you in the contract, the contractual structure, project scope and personal preferences. We have witnessed countless discussions around WBS that didn't really add value to the project. The bottom line was a discussion of preference by project team members representing the same party.

Work breakdown structure represents how the project team will divide and tackle the project. For example, if the project is going to be subcontracted to five different companies and these companies will execute their scope as a turnkey contract, one option for the WBS is:

In this imaginary project, we showed one option for a WBS and integrated the structure of the sub-contractor for the sub-scope 1 into the main structure. It all depends on the preference of the project team members.

Now, go back to the diagram above and try to visualize 3 vertical groups. These groups are the schedule levels that are normally referred to. In our example we have:

• Level 1

  • Project

• Level 2

  • Integration

  • Sub-scope 1

  • Sub-scope 2

  • Sub-scope 3

  • Sub-scope 4

  • Sub-scope 5

  • Commissioning

  • Handover

• Level 3

  • Engineering

  • Procurement

  • Construction

In many projects, simply does not make sense to have only 3 levels of WBS. 5 to 7 levels are pretty common. Of course the current scheduling softwares allows almost an unlimited number of levels, but it is not practical and does not make sense. Each WBS item should have a collection of tasks related to it and not a single task. There are exceptions to this guide, but it's to the discretion of the planning professional.

As we said before, the WBS depends on the personal preferences of the project team. The most important characteristic of a good WBS is to cover all project phases. A good WBS should convey a general understanding of the project, scope division and should make sense for the stakeholders.

The project activities should be populated following the work breakdown structure. But that is the subject for the next article...