One of the fundamental roles of a project manager is putting together a coherent and understandable plan with the buy-in (consensus) of the team.
After you have a good plan, you need to be able to execute. That’s where a solid WBS pays for itself.
The size of the project is irrelevant. Grocery shopping, for me, requires a list. I make the list and then rearrange it into a hierarchy to suit my local supermarket layout. All vegetables together, cereals also together, etc. Its been a long time since I had to write a budget figure on the list, but with the economy as it is, that might happen again soon
I take the grocery list (or what you might call my “EATING PROJECT WBS”) with me to the market and as I complete a task like “lettuce to shopping cart”, it gets checked off. Without my “Eating Project WBS” I would probably return home with about 1% of the required work done, leading to extra costs and re-work, as well as a delayed dinner or two.
I have had this habit for almost my entire adult life. When I was a young man in college I lived about 30 miles from town and the campus without a car, the last bus stopped about a mile from my home at 8:00 pm. (this was in the pre cell phone era and certainly in the pre Internet era. When I went to town in the morning I had my “daily life project WBS” made before I left for town. If I wasn’t organized, I didn’t eat, or maybe even sleep in my own bed, and I certainly didn’t meet up with my friends.
The take away:
No matter how small the project a rudimentary WBS will make successful project execution more likely.
No comments:
Post a Comment