Of all the documents used in project management, none is more important than the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). It is this document that determines how you will manage all the aspects of the project, and this document is absolutely necessary if you want to be a professional project manager.
The WBS comes after the Scope Statement, and it "decomposes" (sic) the scope statement into tasks that form the basis for all the work on the project. The breakdown structure actually takes the larger sections of a project and breaks them into smaller tasks so that the project manager can control and manage the project.
This is a very simple WBS for painting a room. The second task level begins to break down what the project manager will have to do to get the room painted. To more clearly establish the project needs, you will probably need breakdowns in the second level, too. For instance, under the task "Prep Walls," you could have the subtasks to "Clean Walls," "Sand Walls," and "Apply Primer."
The more detail you have for project tasks, the better off you are. I have worked with dozens, even hundreds of different people who prepared a WBS for a given project. One thing you should not do is to get too detailed. Usually four or five levels of tasks are sufficient to give the project manager a complete view of the work to be done. Detail beyond this level is usually not helpful. Using common sense is a good idea. Also using someone who has done WBS before can be helpful.
There are several different ways to develop the WBS with your team. One of the most common is to use yellow sticky notes on a board to make sure everyone has a chance to participate. Make people write down their ideas for tasks to be included in the WBS and get them up on the board. It doesn't matter at first pass how right or wrong the WBS is. You are certainly going to make several versions before putting the WBS under version control, so at the beginning, let everyone have input. If one dominant person is controlling the conversation, you can ask everyone to write down their ideas on the notes, put them up on the board in silence, and only then allow people to critique ideas. By doing this, everyone has an equal chance of showing their concepts about the project and the tasks in which they will be involved.
Here are the key parts so far of developing a WBS:
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Everyone is involved.
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No one person dominates.
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The PM doesn't dominate but rather leads the group through the task at hand.
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There are no bad ideas at the beginning.
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In order to make sure tasks do not slip through the cracks, you need to get everyone thinking about their own tasks.
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Doing this one time isn't enough.
This last point is extremely important. Some first-time PMs go through the WBS process with the team once and believe they have a complete, working WBS. This is usually not true, particularly if the project team hasn't worked together before. Many times, only the major tasks are identified. It may take several days until all of the subtasks are recognized and remembered. A project team with many veterans will probably be able to do a WBS in a shorter period than a team doing something like this for the first time.
One of the techniques is to develop the WBS on a whiteboard with the team and then let it sit for a day or two. Perhaps even have a scribe write out what is on the board and then take down the WBS. This means that any new ideas about tasks will be allowed to come out at the next meeting. Remember that each project is unique, so it is extremely important to think and rethink those tasks that will be unique to the project at hand. If everything on your new project is the same as one before it, you do not have a project at all. It is the changes that make the project a project.
Another major consideration is the final format of your WBS. People on the team should be able to see the WBS and request changes to it, and it should be portable enough so that people do not have to walk to the same place to look at it. The answer to this question is simple.
Microsoft Project is the program of choice for most people working on a breakdown structure. Other excellent ones are available for engineering and construction, such as Primavera. For the standard practicing PM, though, MS Project is the best choice.
So after you have had your team together to create a WBS and put it up on the board, the scribe needs to translate that into MS Project, which isn't a very hard task. Because this is electronic, you can email it to all of the team, changes can be recorded, and version control can be maintained. Not only can version control be maintainedit must be.