Work Breakdown Structure in Project Management

Abstract

Project Management is often a complex process involving Stakeholders, Teams, Development Approaches, Planning, Project Work, Delivery, Measurement, and Uncertainty. As part of Planning and Delivery it is important to define the Scope and Requirements in order to break down the complex tasks into manageable sub-tasks of the whole project (PMBOK; Seventh Edition, 2021, p. 81). Therefore, in this Wiki article, the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) will be presented as a Project Management method used to reduce the complexity of a project by delimiting the whole project plan into manageable sub-tasks. This Wiki article will further cover context and history of WBS along with explanation on how to use it in Project management and what are the principles, advantages and limitations of this method. Since WBS is very flexible and easily applicable tool, the article will focus on most popular ways of application specifically used in Projects.

Context and Historical Applications

Historically, the Work Breakdown Structure method was inspired by Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) used by United States Department of Defense (DoD). In 1968, along with aerospace industry and National Aeronautics and Space Agency(NASA) DoD has published a "Work Breakdown Structures for Defense Materiel Items" (MIL-STD-881). Similarly, NASA has adopted WBS and has a handbook of its own. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20180000844 WBS in both organisations are used for Programs, Products and Projects.

WBS Terminology and Principles

Before diving into the Work Breakdown Structure and its application it is important to understand the main principles of this tool and some of its terminology. Therefore, this section will cover main terms of WBS along with explanations and principles with their impact to the use of method.

Decomposition

As indicated by the naming, this method relies on Breakdown principle often called decomposition.

Terms