Project Management for Non-Project Managers

CHAPTER SEVENStaying Focused on Project Deliverables

As a functional manager, your goal is to keep the project team and your stakeholders focused on deliverables. I am not proposing that you become an expert at decomposing deliverable structures, also known as work breakdown structures (WBS). However, deliverable structures are a fundamental element of project planning, one that is often misunderstood and incorrectly used.

I attended a project management conference a few years ago; a presenter at the conference was discussing the effective use of work breakdown structures. He asked a room of about 150 certified project managers if a WBS was created by inputting a series of tasks into a scheduling tool. From earlier chapters of this book, you ...