This is not necessarily a large project, but the installation of 10 wireless access points in a company is a complex undertaking that has the potential to impact a lot of stakeholders and also incur a lot of company resources and cost. The Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is known as the “foundation” of the project (Mathis, 2008). The WBS helps break down the complex tasks into progressively smaller pieces. Basically a $100,000 could be made to look like a bunch of $5000-$10,000 projects. This activity has the scope of most departments in the organization; the WBS assists in coordination and communication with the different departments. What the WBS does best is provide visibility and awareness into any project. This essentially translates into the project teams and sponsors having a good view on the schedule estimates, and also to effectively manage the schedule to ensure that the project gets completed on time. The WBS should be designed with consideration for its eventual uses. The WBS design should try to achieve certain goals:
• Be compatible with how the work will be done and how costs and schedules will be managed,
• Give visibility to important or risky work efforts,
• Allow mapping of requirements, plans, testing, and deliverables,
• Foster clear ownership by managers and task leaders,
• Provide data for performance measurement and historical databases, and
• Make sense to the workers and accountants (Chapman, 2004).
The activity of creating a project plans ensures that the project team has given enough though to all the key areas, and is well prepared to execute the project, thus enabling complex tasks to be broken down and managed in an effective manner. From a communication perspective as well, the work breakdown structure looks at the various tasks that are being performed by different stakeholders and organizes the required communication,