Once you have established your manageability criteria, you are ready to develop the Work Breakdown Structure. At this stage, you have all that is needed to start to plan your Work Breakdown Structure correctly.
The Work Breakdown Structure of our method is not an open chart that everyone can draw as he wishes. From our perspective, it is strictly based on the following simple guidelines:
The top horizontal level of the Work Breakdown Structure is the Stages Breakdown Structure. This means that our WBS is process-based and therefore will suit best the Recourse Allocation Matrix for recourses, balance, utilization, and analysis. We add another upper main package which is called management. Under this management, we add all that we know should be but is we have no specific place to put in the WBS.
Usually, we add in this breakdown: meetings (internal and external), reviews, documentation required, external issues connected to the project, and marketing activities. It is important to add all these to the project WBS to get an accurate total cost of the project.
1. The top header of the Work Breakdown Structure is the upper level of the Stage Breakdown Structure you have completed already. We use the improved stages of the project as the title of each branch in the Work Breakdown Structure tree.
2. To build the Work Breakdown Structure packages we pick every breakdown package from the Product Breakdown Structure and attach it to the stages, which we defined earlier. Each of the basic bricks from the Product Breakdown Structure can be copied to several stages in the Work Breakdown Structure. For example, a module can be copied to requirement, documentation, design, approval, development, quality assurance, and implementation at the customer location.
You must complete all your Product Breakdown Structure bricks and copy them to your Work Breakdown Structure.
3. We do not link levels with a team or team members. We do this when we transfer the Work Breakdown Structure to Activities Breakdown Structure usually a Gantt chart or Action Items based system.
Pay attention that this type of WBS sets the project stages and what we need to do at every stage, but the order in the specific stages is not set yet.
The Work Breakdown Structure dictionary includes the following content:
Input required or prerequisite action that is essential for this work to start
Work description
Infrastructure requirements
The planned cost of the work
Special consultancy required
Output description