Purpose: The purpose of the Work Breakdown Structure template is to document the systematical structure of a project to define its organization or structural levels and plan resource allocation.
Core concerns: The Work Breakdown Structure diagram consists of Results, Notes, and their connections. It gives a simple overview of the structure of a projects phases and deliverables. In the illustration below, a Work Breakdown Structure for a project that is to define the requirement specifications for a new booking system:
Inside each Result, information about the estimated needed resources.
Relation to other templates: As a Work Breakdown Structure offers a detailed view of a project’s phases and deliverables and is as such, related to the Work Model. To determine the critical path of a project you should use the Critical Path Method Diagram.
Properties and metadata: The Work Breakdown Structure can for example retain the following information:
- A description of the diagram
- Link to the owner of the diagram
- Link to the one responsible for the accuracy of the diagram
- Audits (auto generated information regarding its current state and access rights)
- Associated documents, diagrams and other objects
- Inherent Risk detailing risk considerations
- Governance information detailing information about the published diagram and who has been involved in the approval of the diagram
- Project status: information about budgeted and actual man-hours spent, percentage completed and the latest milestone, result and quality control of a change process.
In the picture below you can see the Work Breakdown Structure’s properties dialogue window, where the properties can be viewed and edited:
