Creating a Work Breakdown Structure

A free video tutorial from Tony Agront, PMP, MBA
Project Management Consultant and Instructor, 20+ Years Exp.
2 courses
6,805 students
Lecture description
In this section, we will cover the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). We will cover the definition and importance of a WBS for project scheduling. I will provide a sample Work Breakdown Structure and walk through the important parts.
Learn more from the full course
Microsoft Project Basics - How to Create Your First Project
Great Course for those new to Microsoft Project! Learn how to use Microsoft Project in easy to follow steps.
01:17:23 of on-demand video • Updated July 2016
Understand the features of Microsoft Project
Read and interpret a project schedule built on MS Project
Develop a full blown project schedule on MS Project on their own
Identify the Critical Path of a Project
Learn Project Scheduling Best Practices
English
Hi welcome back to creating your first
microsoft schedule. So now we're going to go into talking about our
work breakdown structure and that's going to be our first step in developing
our project schedule. So we have to have an idea of what is a work breakdown
structure and how we can go about developing the work breakdown structure.
Again it's the critical part in our first step to developing a project
schedule We want to have this done before we
actually start working within Microsoft Project So first of all what is a work breakdown
structure, well it's pretty much what it says. It's really a way that you can
show the work and having a little structure of how you're going to show
the work for the project So you divide the project into chunks
and you say well this is how we're going to accomplish
the work for the project So you have a little structure to
it and it's important because if you don't do this, you're going to get to a
point where you're just going to add tasks within your schedule and you can
put it here in this line and you're not going to have any type of
organizational type of way that you're maintaining the structural
integrity of the projects schedule It will get out
of whack real quickly You might start adding tasks that you
already added in and you might have duplicate tasks and stuff like that. So
it's good to have a structured organization - how you are
going to have the project being run so the main tool that I use developing a work
breakdown structure is Microsoft Excel only because I can do it any way. I can show it in a nice way with using the tables. It's easier to for me
to manipulate the tables within Excel. So I use Microsoft Excel for my
work breakdown structure. You can do it within Microsoft Project and there is a
way to do it within microsoft project but just go ahead and use Excel; it's a
much that simpler tool to actually do the work breakdown structure. So
let's take a look at what our work breakdown structure will look like So I'm going to have the project that we're going to be doing
in this course is called the ABC software application enhancement. I picked this type of application enhancement project basically
because it was rather simple and not that complex. So our work breakdown structure, let's take a look at what it looks like So here is a sample work breakdown
structure Now if you look at it, it looks like an
organization chart. You have the top part here where it's really
called level one and you have the first level task and that's actually the
project, so it's just a project name on the first level. The second level and this is the typical way of numbering this is basically how you going to
break down the work. So I broke it into different silos here and one for
management, requirements, design, development, test, and delivery. So we have different silos that we're
going to be using for where we're going to put our tasks So we have tasks under management, we
have tasks under requirements and so on and it's just a way that we
organizing the tasks so we're looking at it top-down how we're going
to accomplish this project. So we have these tasks already and into a
structured environment Now let's take a look at how we can
actually work that within Excel how we're going to put some task in there. So I'm going to open up Excel and I have Excel and I have a work breakdown structure already developed for that - lets go to
that So this is our application
enhancement project again that we're talking about and I have these tasks in here
where I have the software application enhancement at the top level then i have
the individual silos that I'm going to be doing work within. Underneath in these
individual areas I'm going to start adding tasks and I did that already for
you guys where I have like for instance under
management I have create the statement of work, establish a project charter, develop and
baseline a schedule, develop and baseline the budget and so on. I would have all
these tasks within different areas. This shows our work breakdown
structure. So I'll expand it all out for you We have all these tasks already within
our work breakdown structure. So these are our individual
tasks that we're going to be accomplishing within our project. We broke it out this way so we know that okay, well, what's going to be done in the
design area, what's going to be done in any particular area. We have that already
understood. So, next, we're going to do
one more step before we actually close out developing the work breakdown
structure and say we finished this and this to actually look at some of
the resources that we're going to use. So we want to make sure that we understand
who are we going to be using within these particular tasks So I've done that in a separate
tab so I like to do that in a separate tab as well I have certain resources. Now i'll
expand that out and I'll show you for instance I'll put like resources on
the lead or a person and any type of material that we will be using. Again, we're
not going to be covering material too much in this course but we
will talk about this So this is how you would map
out all the resources that you're going to be using on the particular task so we have an idea of who we are going
to be using on each individual task. We make sure we have that all identified here Now one thing that you want to do, you
develop this work breakdown structure at the beginning but you may want to go back
and modify this add some tasks when you start adding
task into there but at least when we have this in the beginning of the project we
understand what the work breakdown structure is. It establishes our
idea of how the project is going to go. Some people go back and actually modify
the work breakdown structure is they come along That is the proper way but understand
that you know it takes a lot of going back and forth when you are going to update microsoft project then go back to excel So do your best to maintain the
integrity of the work breakdown structure but establish your work
breakdown structure in the beginning very critical to understand.
You have to understand you have to have a work breakdown structure in the
beginning. So once we actually have all that that information we're going to be able to work within Microsoft Project
and i'm going to show you how we do all that within Microsoft Project and how we
actually add all our resources and all our task
in there so next time when we actually meet we're going
to open up Microsoft Project. I'm going to set it up so that we
can actually start putting up our information in there. Thank you and I'll see you there