Lesson 14: The Work Breakdown Stucture (WBS)

Building on the previous lessons and taking the case study as departure point it is possible to move further and do detailed scoping for the project. Although the exercises in the previous lessons did not require full development of the Project Charter, let us assume that we have been able to define the final deliverable and high level deliverable's of our aircraft assembly project as follows:

Final deliverable:

Assembled Airbus, ready for its first airworthy inspection prior to first test flight (from here on we will just refer to this deliverable as - "Assembled Airbus")

High Level Deliverable's:

To keep it very high level and not complicate our case study, our high level deliverable s will be very general. However, remember that the high level deliverable should be such that it produces the final deliverable:

• Assembly plant secured
• Workforce appointments completed
• Component delivery check-in completed
• Sub-component assembly completed
• Interior fitted
• Final assembly completed
• Handover of aircraft completed
  

With the above clarified (albeit at a very high and general level) the next phase of the project can be embarked upon. In this next phase (the Planning Phase of the project) one of the first tasks would be to define the scope of work. This is achieved by developing a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS).

Per definition the WBS has two main elements:

• A hierarchical outline (map) that identifies the products (deliverable's) and work elements involved in the project
• This map defines the relationship of the final deliverable to its sub deliverables' and in turn, their relationships to work packages (collection of elements related to work that must be done)