Effective Software Project Management

Approaches to Building the WBS

There are many ways to build the WBS. Hypothetically, if you put each member of the planning team in a different room and ask each one to develop the project WBS, they might all come back with different renditions. That’s all right—there is no single best answer. The choice is subjective and based more on the project manager’s preference than on any other requirements. However, even though you might like the choice to be a personal one that the project manager makes (after all, he or she is charged with managing the project, so why not allow him or her to choose the architecture that makes that task the easiest), unfortunately that will not work in many cases. The choice of approach must take into consideration the uses to which the WBS will be put.

There are three general approaches to building the WBS:

Noun-Type Approaches

Noun-type approaches define the deliverable of the project work in terms of the components (physical or functional) that make up the deliverable. This is the approach currently recommended by PMI.

Verb-Type Approaches

Verb-type approaches define the deliverable of the project work in terms of the actions that must be done to produce the deliverable. These include the design-build-test-implement and project objectives approaches. This approach was once recommended by PMI.

Organizational Approaches

Organizational approaches define the deliverable of the project work in terms of the organizational units that will work on the project. ...