Episode 3: Work Breakdown Structure

ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER ● CELESTE CLANCY  NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers, for project managers.  It’s a chance for us to get together every couple of weeks and have a conversation about what matters to you as a professional project manager.  We’ll cover subjects such as project management certification, doing the job of project management; and we’ll get inside the brains of some of the leaders in the industry and maybe hear your stories.  I’m your host, Nick Walker, and with me are our resident experts, who have been in the trenches and stood on the mountaintops.  They are the project managers who mentor other project managers and those working toward that title, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates. Andy and Bill, we have a lot to cover today.  We’ll get to some certification subjects in just a bit.  But let’s start off by talking philosophy.  It’s about the WBS, the work breakdown structure that organizes a team’s work into manageable sections.  There are a couple of different philosophies about this subject when it comes to project management.  Andy, what are those? ANDY CROWE:  Well, you know, a couple of the approaches that we see out there sort of follow the overall approaches in project management.  It’s either top-down or bottom-up.  And so really a lot of the top-down crowd, which you might consider to be Waterfall, SDLC, sort of a traditional approach, they’re really going to favor the WBS.  They’re going to favor looking at it, decomposing the scope, breaking it down, getting to the work packages.  And we’ll talk more about that and explore that. The Agile community doesn’t really do this.  So you’re not going to see a WBS chart on the wall of an Agile team.  Agile takes a different approach.  They have a more dynamic approach.  So the goal with the WBS is to get the work documented and really understood upfront.  And Agile believes that maybe it’s not always better to do that.  So we’re going to be talking to the traditional crowd.  We are going to have some things to say to the Agile community next week, I think.  But this week is more for the traditional SDLC crowd. NICK WALKER:  All right.  Bill, tell us a little bit about your experience in all of this.  Do you have a take on this? BILL YATES:  Yeah, absolutely.  The work breakdown structure, there are some different names.  Andy, when you hear WBS, are there some other things that you think of?  I’ve heard one, I know Louis likes to refer to it as “work bite sizes.” ANDY CROWE:  Hah, I like that. BILL YATES:  There are some other uses for that abbreviation. ANDY CROWE:  Yeah, that’s good, that’s good. BILL YATES:  And they’re making some up there.  There are – it’s very interesting when we talk about the WBS.  One of the common fallacies that I think we’ve all seen is people having confusion between, okay, what’s on the work breakdown structure and what’s on the schedule? ANDY CROWE:  Right, where does one end and the next one begin, sure, sure, sure. BILL YATES:  Yeah, yeah.  Or I’ve seen cases or heard conversations with project managers where I think there’s a complete misunderstanding of which is which, what goes where.  And so simplicity, if you think about a work breakdown structure as being a visual graph that helps us see what are the outputs, what are the things that we’re going to produce with this project, then that’s a great way to differentiate that from the schedule.  So simplifying a work breakdown structure focuses on the “what.”  What is it that I’m going to produce?  What are the deliverables?  Andy, I remember when I was studying for the PMP exam, one of the things, an analogy that was helpful was “noun versus verb.” ANDY CROWE:  Right. BILL YATES:  So the nouns are on the WBS. ANDY CROWE:  Right. BILL YATES:  This is the outcome of all of our actions in our work.  Whereas the schedule of best practice is to take those nouns, those deliverables that we’ll produce that are on the WB...