Effective Work Breakdown, Research Paper Example

If a WBS does not align the project’s charter and scope, it is likely that it is not detailed enough and it is recommended that the WBS be revised. However when this does not occur, consequences result including a disruption of the dynamic flow of the project, the project may become controlled by stakeholders and project team members rather than the project manager, stakeholders who understand the WBS may decide to leave out important steps if the outcome is not clear or cut corners, and project team members may contribute effective suggestions to the project that result in too high of a cost. Thus, when the WBS is unable to align the project’s charter and scope, the work manager is not providing the work team with a detailed enough guide and the work will ultimately deviate from what is intended. To avoid this, it is essential to make sure that all goals make contextual sense within the scope of the project and to provide a precise account of how they should be accomplished and how problems and deviations from the WBS should be dealt with.

The consequences of the WBS failing to align with the project’s charter and scope is related to the process groups that are impacted as well. This failure may impact the planning, executing, monitoring, and controlling process groups because once the initiating process group is impacted it is likely that the WBS deviations will be carried throughout the rest of the work. Although the initiating phase simply involves the identification of stakeholders and developing the project charter, it could potentially be impacted by a WBS failure depending on who is given the responsibility for these first two steps. If the project manager completes this phase of the project alone, it is unlikely to be an issue. However, if additional team members become involved, it is possible that the consequences discussed previously will occur. When considering the planning process group, it is likely that this will become impacted on the basis of time, cost, risk, and quality factors. It is important to have a WBS align a project’s charter and scope in order to avoid this. In the executing process group, integration will be challenging because scope is not clearly defined, as will quality, communication, and procurement. The monitoring and control process groups will be impacted for the same reasons.

An example of when the WBS does not align the project’s charter and scope may be physically evident on the basis of the behavior of the work team. Communication skills will certainly lack, and the particular actions that enact while doing their job may not align with what is expected. Therefore, one could simply observe workers to determine whether they are able to follow the WBS. If the project manager concludes that the employees are not following the WBS based on observation, it is essential for him or her to step in and ask the employees why they are choosing to make these particular decisions. If it is found that the WBS is unclear, it is necessary for the project manager to reformat it immediately in a manner that is cohesive and understandable. Once this is done, the employee’s will have less of an opportunity to provide their own interpretation to the document and will do what was initially expected of them.

The purpose of a WBS in the project planning phase is to establish what the scope of the project is, determine associated objectives, and to determine specifically what the team will need to do to accomplish the project. The significant features of this WBS phase include the development of the project management plan, a collection of requirements, the definition of scope, creation of the WBS, and a plan of activities, among others.

The development of the project management plan is an overall plan that is used to define and coordinate the rest of the plans that will be used throughout the project and is considered the integration of project plans. A collection of requirements helps define the scope and defines and documents the stakeholders’ reasons for wanting to meet the project objective. The actual documents that should be produced for this stage include the requirements traceability matrix and the requirements documentation. The definition of the scope is ultimately a detailed description of what the project intends to do and what the outcome will be like. The output for this phase of the project include project document updates and the project scope statement. The actual creation of the WBS is meant primarily to divide the work that the project is mean to complete into subdivisions so that it is more manageable. The outputs of this include listing the project breakdown, defining terms that may not be readily understood, adding a scope baseline, and including project updates as necessary. Activities must be defined in the WBS in order to help employees understand how to accomplish project deliverables. The documents that define this are the activity list, milestone list, and attributes.

References

Haugan GT. (2001). Effective Work Breakdown. Tysons Corner, VA: Management Concepts.

Kannappan R. (2011). Project Management Processes, Process Groups and Knowledge area. Retrieved from http://rajakannappan.blogspot.com/2011/12/project-management-processes-process.html