Impact+Of+Various+Work-

international

Journal of Project

Management

1994 12 (3) 165-171

Impact of various work-breakdown structures on project conceptualization
Shlomo Globerson
School of Business Administration, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel

For a project to be properly managed, there is a need to generate its work-breakdown structure (WBS), and to define work packages so that they can becorrectly assigned to organizational units. The WBS may be considered the taxonomy of a project. Several possible patterns of WBS can be generated, despite the fact that all of them describe the same project. However, different WBS patterns call for different organizational structures and management styles during project implementation. Thus, the WBS designer already has a significant impact onthe way that a project is to be managed at the very early stage of proposal submission, sometimes without being aware of it. A mismatch between the project WBS, the organizational structure, and the management style of the project manager has a negative impact on the likelihood of the project being completed successfully. Chaos results if the various parties to the project each produce a differentWBS. The paper discusses the above issues, and presents an analysis of the different options for a WBS for an example project, and the possible impact of the options on the preferred organizational structure and management style.
Keywords: work-breakdown structure, management style, organizational structure

For a large project to be properly planned and executed, it must be ‘decomposed’ intosmall segments in a structural manner. The planning and execution of these segments is then assigned to specific organizational units. This ‘slicing’ approach, called the work-breakdown structure (WBS), is not new. The US Government formalized this concept for project management as early as 1962, when it started to demand that the WBS be used by all organizations working on federal projects. ThePERT Coordinating Group’ defines a WBS as a family-tree subdivision of a programme that begins with the end objectives, and subdivides these objectives into successive smaller end-item subdivisions. The WBS establishes the framework for
l l l

defining the work to be accomplished; constructing a network plan; summarizing the cost and schedule status of a programme for progressively higher levelsof management.

The smallest element in the WBS is called a ‘work package’, and it is defined by the PERT Coordinating Group’ as the work required to complete a specific job or
0263-7863/94/030165-07 0 1994 Butterworth-Heinemann Itd

process, such as a report, design, documentation requirement or portion thereof, piece of hardware, or service. A work package may consist of one or morecostsignificant activities. Its content may be limited to the work which can be performed by a single operating unit in an organization, or it may require the contributing services of several operating units. The overall responsibility for the work content of a work package should be assigned to a single organization or responsible individual. In other words, the proper planning and execution of aproject requires the assignment of each work package to a specific organizational unit. Other definitions of WBS government documents can be found in later publications, such as References 2 and 3. However, although the wordings differ, the meanings are similar, and, for the purposes of this paper, it is not essential to emphasize the differences. From the very early stage of submitting a projectproposal, it is important to formulate the content of the project via a WBS. Such an early WBS formulation enables project needs to be better defined, and the resource and time estimations required to complete the project to be improved. Nevertheless, it is important to note that the WBS of a project changes over time, according to altering 165

Impact of various u~ork-breokdo~~n structures on...