Saturday, June 16, 2007

blogger.sai.june.wbs: Yes. It is about Work Breakdown Structure

History:
Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) was initially developed by the U.S. defense establishment, and it is described in Military Standard (MIL-STD) 881B (25 Mar 93) as follows: “A work breakdown structure is a product-oriented family tree composed of hardware, software, services, data and facilities …. [it] displays and defines the product(s) to be developed and/or produced and relates the elements of work to be accomplished to each other and to the end product(s).”

(Simple) Definition:
A project can be made more manageable by breaking it down into individual components that together are known as WBS. Thus, it is a result-oriented family structure that captures all the work of a project in an organized way. It answers “what” of the project rather than the “who”, “how” or “when” part of the project. That is, it is a clear description of the project deliverables and scope, and not a description of the process or the schedule of the project.
It facilitates other project management processes such as estimation, scheduling, resource allocation and even risk analysis of the project.

Is WBS process-oriented or product-oriented?
Though the initial definition of WBS was to create a product-oriented family structure, subsequently it was made flexible to support process-oriented family structure. WBS can be built using verbs or nouns. If the results of the project are more of verbs then a verb-based (or process-based) WBS is recommended.

WBS Design Principles
100% Rule: Practice Standard for Work Breakdown Structures (Second Edition), published by the Project Management Institute (PMI) defines the 100% Rule as follows:
The 100% Rule…states that the WBS includes 100% of the work defined by the project scope and captures ALL deliverables – internal, external, interim – in terms of the work to be completed, including project management. … The rule applies at all levels within the hierarchy: the sum of the work at the “child” level must equal 100% of the work represented by the “parent” and the WBS should not include any work that falls outside the actual scope of the project, that is, it cannot include more than 100% of the work… It is important to remember that the 100% rule also applies to the activity level. The work represented by the activities in each work package must add up to 100% of the work necessary to complete the work package.

Focus on planned outcomes and not planned actions
Best approach to adhere to 100% rule is to define the WBS elements in terms of outcomes or results, rather than in actions. In product development, the hierarchy is made up of components that make up an item and hence called product breakdown structure. When the work is divided by phases, it must be ensured each phase is clearly separated by deliverables with entry and exit criteria defined.

Mutually exclusive elements
In addition to 100% rule, it is important there is no overlap between in “what” needs to be achieved by two elements in WBS. If there is an ambiguity, it may result in duplicated work or miscommunication. This can be avoided, by mantaining a WBS dictionary. The dictionary describes each WBS element with scope, deliverables, activities, resources and even dates.

WBS Coding Scheme
WBS elements are numbered sequentially to reveal the hierarchy structure. For example blogger.sai.june.wbs, indicates this post is for the month of June submitted by sai in blogger. WBS codes can be letters and numbers (or even combination) that helps to identify the relationship among the tasks and organizes the project.

Baseline your schedule

What is a baseline schedule?
It is the target to aim for! It is recommended to have the baseline unchanged through out the project, unless an approved change request demands a change.


What does the scheduler do when I do a baseline?
Once baselined, baseline version of a schedule contains only five task-related fields - baseline start, baseline end, baseline duration, baseline work and baseline cost. Apart from this resource and assignment related fields are also baselined.

How many baselines are supported in MS Project 2003?
You can have a maximum of 11 baselines and 10 interim plans.

What is an interim plan? It sounds like, only some fields are copied but it is not a baseline.
Certainly yes. Interim plans (Start1/Finish1 through Start10/Finish10) can contain only start and finish date fields. You can copy a set into any other set ant any time. Warning! don’t copy to your current schedule, as it affects duration and work fields.

How to baseline my current schedule?
1. Choose Tools, Tracking, Save Baseline. The Save Baseline dialog appears.
2. If this is your first baseline, then choose Save Baseline and click OK button 3. If you have changed your schedule due to an approved change, then
3a. Select Save Interim Plan and select under Copy the current Baseline and under Into the next available set of baseline fields. If this is your first revision, then it would be Baseline1.
3b. Click OK button; now the current date on which you copied the baseline is captured in the name of the baseline.
3c. Now select the tasks affected by the change request in Gantt table. These can be:
> Newly inserted tasks
> Dependency change on existing tasks
> Change in duration, work, start date and end date of existing tasks
3d. Repeat step 1.
3e. Select the option For: Selected tasks
3f. Under Roll up baselines, check the two options To all summary tasks and From subtasks into selected summary tasks.
3g. Click OK button.

What does To all summary tasks and From subtasks into selected summary tasks indicated in step 3f mean?
To all summary tasks: Check this option to update baseline information on all the higher-level summary tasks of the detail tasks selected.

From subtasks into selected summary tasks: Check this option to update only the summary tasks that you selected.

If Review Design document detailed task end date is changed due to approved change request which inturn affects its Design summary task end date, then select the Review Design document task and check To all summary tasks to ask MS Project to recalculate the start date and end date of all summary tasks containing this detailed tasks.

If you have not checked both the options, then the selected Review Design document detailed task will only be baselined without affecting its summary task. After baselinining, you can correct it by selecting the affected summary task, say Design, and baselining again with From subtasks into selected summary tasks checked.