Different approaches of building WBS

After project scope is defined, WBS is the critical step to bring the project forward. This article will discuss about an overview and comparison of the different WBS approaches and provide my personal experience of developing WBS for the informational systems in an Asian company.

About me:

I worked as an IS (Information systems) developer, SD, SA, and project manager in the information center of Chunghwa telecomm., the biggest telephone company in Taiwan. I was in charge of a number of IS projects, with overlapping schedules. I was also a product manager for Promise Inc., a global storage technology company. As a product manager, I am also handling each product line as an individual project. Through my five years project-related experience, I have adopted several of the WBS approaches mentioned below.

The Overview of the WBS approaches:

The activity-focused WBS approach
This is the most common approach in my company. This approach mainly uses verb and noun. From the conceptual level of project scope, the work is gradually and sequentially divided into separate tasks, which could be managed and accomplished individually. While the top level presents the higher level overview, the bottom level presents the most detail tasks.
The activities clearly describe the “action”, i.e. “what to do”, yet it’d be easy for the project manager to focus too much on the activities and neglect the tangible and measurable deliverables.

The process-focused WBS approach
Instead of focusing on the tasks covered by the project scope, this approach focuses more on the business processes which are required to accomplish the tasks defined in the project scope. Therefore, the deliverables will be analyzed according to each process individually. The combination of all the deliverables from each process will be the final deliverables for the project
The advantage of this approach would be that it clearly depicted how things should be done. The disadvantage is that the analysis of each business process can not tell an overall picture of project activities on a given stage.

The deliverable- focused WBS approach
This approach only uses nouns instead of verbs. Rather than focuses on “what to do”, ti focuses on “what should be done”. In other words, it cares more about the final deliverables instead of the actions leading to the deliverables.

It is a result driven approach, ensuring the deliverables satisfying the project requirements. However, the weakness would be that it’d result in too much focus on the trivial deliverables while neglect the efforts and the complexity of the tasks required to achieve the deliverables.

The outcome-focused WBS approach
This approach focuses on the outcome, i.e. the desirable effect resulted from the activities. Based on the target outcome, the required tasks and activities are planned. The strength of this approach is that it directly targets at the desired effect; the weakness of this approach is that the “desired effect” is usually hard to define and measure. It’s not easy to tell what tasks could result in the desirable result.

During the work in the IS development, we adopted the activity focused approach mostly in accordance with the Top-down SDLC we applied, since we almost built every individual IS from scratch. It clearly expressed the conceptual views at different levels, which is also convent for a project manager to present to different stakeholders’.

However, during my term working as a dedicated OEM product manager, most of our OEM products are customized from channel products. Therefore, most projects could refer to other similar projects. As a result, instead of conducting top-down activity focused approach, I mostly adopted the deliverables-focused approach in that most of the deliverables have been finalized in other projects and the customization would only change few of the deliverables.

To sum up, different approaches could be applied for different focus of the projects. However, the ideal recommendation would be to utilize more than one approach for the WBS in that the comparison of different approaches would compensate the weakness of each other and help project manager to prevent the negligence.