Exploring work breakdown structure in Project Management
A project is a work that is not a process or operations; it has a start, an end, and goals. Several companies work on different projects to launch a product to meet the stakeholders’ requirements.
Project Management is a practice of leading the team’s work to achieve goals and meet the success criteria in the given amount of time. It is the way a person manages and organizes resources that are necessary to complete the project. The people who manage the projects are called Project Managers. Project management is the application of knowledge, tools, skills, and techniques to project activities to meet the project’s requirements. There are five stages in project management, and those are: conception, initiation, planning, execution, and performance, and then after these five stages, the project is closed. A project manager should always be detail-oriented, business savvy, and see how the project is tied to the organization’s overarching business goals. They should also be people friendly with excellent communication skills and the ability to motivate the team members to give their best to the project. There are three essential components of project management: Processes, Resources, and People. While there are many project management types, there are seven primary ones that get used often, and those are Agile project management, Scrum project management, Kanban project management, Lean project management, Six Sigma project management, PRINCE2 project management, and waterfall project management. To make your project successful, you need to have some essential elements such as strategic planning, product development, communication, people, resources. The main purpose if project management is to predict as many as dangers and problems as possible and to plan, organize, and control activities so that the project is completed successfully despite all the risks.
What is the Work Breakdown Structure?
WBS (work breakdown structure) is a project management tool that breaks a project into smaller and more manageable pieces. The work packages are the deliverables and output, which are divided into small pieces. A work package is designed to monitor and control the work package, schedule the work package, and estimate the cost for the created work package. A project manager should create the WBS in the planning stage after collecting all the requirements for particular project-including stakeholder requirements. The WBS involves a project manager, project management team, project team, and all the identified stakeholders. The project managers are more frequently finding high value in creating WBS as they begin the process of project management. Project success may be attributed specifically to the use of a WBS. Everyday practice is revealing with increasing regularity that the creation of a WBS to define the scope of the project will help ensure delivery of the project’s objectives and outcomes.
Benefits of WBS –
One of the work breakdown structure benefits is that it is an essential tool in the modern-day project management. The WBS can be reused again and again for several projects if nature if the future projects demand the same nature of the output. Also, if nature ic the project is different from the current one, then it also can be used with some simple changes. There is also a WBS dictionary, and it is the work defined for every work package in WBS. When new members join in the project
Importance of WBS –
Regardless of how successfully the project managers plan and execute the projects, many things go wrong. Component or full-project failures when they do occur can often be traced to a poorly developed WBS. A poorly constructed WBS can result in adverse project outcomes. These include repeated project re-plans and extensions, unclear work assignments, budget overrun, missed deadlines, frequently changing scope, scope creep, and unusable new products or delivered features. The WBS is a foundational building block to initiating, planning, executing, and monitoring and controlling processes that are used to manage the project. There are many project management tools and techniques that use the WBS or its components as input. The WBS is used as a starting point for scope management and is integral to other PMI processes, and as a result, the standards that define these processes explicitly or implicitly rely on the WBS.
This is the Work breakdown structure in Project Management.