2.3 Planning and the WBS, Part 2

We take a look at a work break down structure. What does it start to look like? Well we’re gonna build a house. We say for this house, there are four buckets of things. What we wanna do is just figure out what are the elements of our project. We’re gonna break the big project of the Golden Gate Bridge into some smaller pieces. Something we can actually understand, define, work with. So to put our house together, we have to get the ground ready to put the house on. We have to do something with bricks, mortar, concrete. We have to do something of wood. That’s going to include everything. The frame of the house, it’s going to include the doors, the windows the cabinets in the house. The wooden trim around the, the floorboard. All the things that have to do with wood are gonna be in that category and then finishing work will include everything else. [INAUDIBLE] plumbing, electrical work, anything in there. Everything that’s gonna be done in the house will be in one of these four categories. Now we can break that down further. To see finer levels of detail in this graphic view of the WBS, we go down a level. So now we’re gonna go down under masonry where we have the footings, the piers, the exterior walls, and the chimney. Everything that has to do with bricks, concrete, mortar will be in one of those four areas. Gonna take a look at a book project. This is a book project. We’re gonna do a book project and we’re not just gonna write the book. This is everything from concept to delivery. Everything from the initial book proposal all the way through to book is sitting on someone’s coffee table in their house. These are all the details under some of the categories. We’ll put all of the details under all of the categories. When we get done with this, we see at the top level, we have the deliverables of the project. So we have the product scope, and then underneath that, we have the project scope, all those little individual tasks. And together now, we have a detailed picture of the total scope of the project. Let’s look at an example of this. We have a project. Deliverables underneath there. Sub-deliverables under there. Sub-deliverables under some of those. We finally get all of our deliverables laid out here. And so this is the top level. These are the things that this project will actually provide. These are the products, the services, the information, the results that will come from this project. And then underneath each one of those will have major groupings of work. And under those major groupings of work, we will break down those eventually into detail tasks. Project activities, detail tasks. Keep breaking these things down further and further and further to get to that detail task level. This is still pretty high level. This is a picture of the scope of the project at least at some level where we have all of the de, deliverables across the top and then we have large groupings of work under each one of these deliverables to show us that there are some work we have to do in this project. Each one of those will be broken down further into project activities and further and further and further levels down to detailed task. Here’s an example we’re gonna look at. We’re going to with some specifics in here. The mental health system of Southwest Virginia, we need to do a report on that. What’s it look like? We have to do some kind of an analysis of current institutional care, current community based care. We have to do a budgetary analysis and we have to finally do a report on this thing. You’ll notice that there’s some numbering on here. As we go down different levels, we start to see that these numbers get longer. So, if we look at element number 3, underneath there it has two elements, 1 and 2. So, if we look at 3.1, 3.2, it means that if we go up higher on the WBS, we look at element number 3, and these are the two elements underneath that. If we look at 3.1.1, 3.1.2, it means that under element 3, way up there in the WBS some place, underneath there, there’s 3.1. And underneath that, now we have two elements underneath that. So this is how the numbering systems works on the WBS. Here are all the deliverables for examining the current state of mental health in Southwest Virginia and coming up with a budgetary analysis of how money should be spent for those two areas. And then we’ll start to put some details underneath some of these things. Some detailed tasks underneath the, these things. Some, actually work packages that would be broken down into further details. So, here we have a pretty high level still of what this project is going to look like. There’s a lot of work that’s gonna be involved here. A lot of people are gonna have to do a lot of work to get this thing done. There are two other ways to put a WBS together. One is at the top level instead of deliverables. At the top level we put act, groups of activities. A lot of times a project team thinks more in, what’s the work we have to do? And then, sometimes we can put this together as a phase based WBS too. What’s the first phase, second phase, third phase, we have phase, we have to do? So here’s one that’s an activity based WBS. And all the different activities that we might have to do instead of the deliverables. There’s more activities under this one. What happened to the deliverables? They’re still there but if you use an activity based WBS or phase based, it’s a good idea to keep your list of deliverables out and keep them clear. Cause they’re still in here, they’re just not easy to find. Phase based WBS. A lot of times you see one that looks like this, design, test, build, implement. Here’s one from one organization that provides products to, to other companies. And they say well first thing we have to do, is anybody gonna buy these things? So that’s the business analysis. Then they say, yeah, this looks like it’s something somebody will buy. So now they have a commitment to do this. Then they develop this thing. They get ready for release and then it’s finally they start selling this thing and commercialization of it. And then they’ll have some other details underneath there. Levels 1 and 2. More detail underneath there. And here we’re getting very detailed. So again, this just, just wanna show you that we start at the top level. Big pieces break this down further and further and further into finer levels of detail as we move forward. How detailed are we going to get? Stop at whatever level you think is enough so that you can assign this task to a person or a group. And they can go do this. A rough guideline is 4 to 40 hours. Nothing shorter than 4 hours. Nothing longer than 4, 40 hours. This is only a guideline. We look at DuPont for example. If they build major production facilities, you’re gonna very rarely see anything on their, on their WBS that’s less than an 80 hour task. If you look at Duke Power in North Carolina, when they go in to refurbish a substation, they have to get in there and get that thing done rapidly. They have a lot of their tasks broken down into 15-minute increments. So do whatever works well for your organization. We also can start to take a look at the detailed costs of the human resource part of the project. This is our first opportunity to see what the, what’s involved with the human resource part of the project and the costs for that. We can also use this information a little later on, when we start to track the project. Track and control the project. What does this mean? It means that for each one of these tasks that we’ve ended up with, we said okay, something has to happen here. This work that has to happen. For example complete the initial sketches, there’s 210 hours worth of work involved in that. How did we get that? We get that from the people sitting around that, that table with us, our project team. We have the experts on this project sitting around that table. They’re gonna give us those numbers or we can look at past history of similar projects we’ve had in the organization, look at some hard data. There’s number of ways to get those numbers. And then we just say to do one hour of that work, it costs so much money, so that will cost a little over $12,000 to do that in one task. So this is the first place we can get a detailed estimate on the human resource cost of the project. There’s a chart view and an outline view. This is the chart view, this is the outline view. Any of you who use software Microsoft project or any similar kinds of software, Primavera, any of the the, the clones of any of those softwares. It’s gonna start to look like this. Here to see finer levels of detail, we go down a level. And here to see finer levels of detail, we indent. Either one is fine. You don’t have to do both. This seems to be a good planning tool and communicating tool. This is probably a good view when we’re actually monitoring and controlling the project when the project is underway during execution.