Disadvantages of work breakdown structure

Project Management: What is a Work Breakdown Structure?

Learn everything you need to know about a Work Breakdown Structure. Try our award-winning PM software for free: https://www.projectmanager.com/?utm_source=yo...
Education video by Youtube Channel


Disadvantages of Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is a list of challenges that project managers using the WBS methodology overcome.

According to Wikipedia, work-breakdown structure (WBS) in project management and systems engineering, is a deliverable-oriented breakdown of a project into smaller components. A work breakdown structure is a key project deliverable that organizes the team's work into manageable sections. The Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK 5) defines the work-breakdown structure "A hierarchical decomposition of the total scope of work to be carried out by the project team to accomplish the project objectives and create the required deliverables."

WBS does not display tasks in a fixed order. WBS does not indicate dependencies. There is also no prioritization.

The ideal WBS is displayed on one sheet of the document. When compiling WBS, it can be difficult to determine the necessary level of detail for a project. In order to accommodate WBS on one page, it is important to determine the details in advance and decide which of them will be included in the final document and which ones will be used only in supporting documents. If a project has a number of similar tasks, then these tasks can be combined into one "big task" for presentation in WBS. The difficulty is that the wording of the “big task” can be somewhat "vague".

WBS can become outdated faster than the project or its main milestones. There is a contradiction here. On the one hand, WBS dictates the schedule of your project. On the other hand, the schedule of your project will change as the project progresses. The project schedule will change, but WBS will remain the same. At the same time, updating WBS is not accepted among project managers, since the rate of change of a project is often higher than the possible speed of creating WBS.

XS

XL

M