Engineering Project Management

6Organizing and Planning

Congratulations! You have been named the manager of our new engineering project. What do you do next? You decompose the work entailed in performing the project into smaller pieces, using a hierarchy. When this is done in a particular fashion, it is called a work‐breakdown structure. Projects all over the world are managed using a work‐breakdown structure. In this chapter, I both teach you the basics of creating and using a work‐breakdown structure, and I also show you how to do it effectively within the specific context of engineering projects. Then, we move on to discuss the organizational structure of your project, and finally I show you how to use your work‐breakdown structure as the basis to create a complete project plan for your engineering project.

6.1 The Work‐Breakdown Structure

Congratulations! You have now been designated to become the manager of a new engineering project. You are still in the middle of the competition for the contract award, and will soon submit your proposal, as we discussed in Chapter 5. Figure 6.1 shows your project's organization chart so far.

Figure 6.1 Your project.

OK, what do you do next?

You must make a plan for how you will organize the work. And, just like in so many other aspects of systems engineering and engineering project management, to do this we employ a hierarchy. That is, the first step in making ...