USING THE WORK BREAKDOWN STRUCTURE: EXAMPLES

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USING THE WORK BREAKDOWN STRUCTURE: EXAMPLES
R&D Projects

Managing R&D projects is among the toughest areas in project management. These projects are characterized by a high degree of uncertainty, and consequently a large proportion of them is never completed. The importance of careful planning in this environment cannot be overstated.

The diagram in Figure 5 illustrates a WBS planned for an R&D project aimed at developing a new product. The second level of this WBS is organized by the project life cycle, and the third level corresponds to functional departments that are involved in the project.

Equipment-Replacement Projects

Every technology-intensive firm is challenged from time to time with equipment-replacement projects. This type of project is especially common in the high-tech sector, where the frequency of such projects is now measured in months rather than years. The WBS presented in Figure 6 focuses at its second level on the division among activities related to the facility and its infrastructure (requiring civil engineering expertise), activities related to the equipment itself (requiring mechanical engineer- ing expertise), and activities related to manpower (requiring human resource expertise).

Unlike the previous example, the third level is not identical across the three entities of the second level. A greater level of detail is needed to describe the equipment-related activities, and so the corresponding WBS branch is more developed.

Military Projects

To demonstrate the wide-range applicability of the WBS concept, we close this section with an example of a military operation. An army unit (say, a brigade) is faced with a mission to capture a riverbank, construct a bridge, and secure an area (bridgehead) across the river, thus enabling the movement of a larger force in that direction. Figure 7 illustrates how this mission can be planned through WBS principles. The second level of the WBS is arranged by the major military functions

Work Breakdown Structure-0014

that are involved, and the third level is arranged by the life-cycle (illustrated here with a basic distinction between all precombat activities and during-combat activities).

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