The WBS that visualise projects

In project management, there is WBS (Work Breakdown Structure) as a method of visualising services. Although WBS consists of 5W2H and is extremely simple, it requires much effort to create. However, once all resource inputs are completed, you will grasp budget management / schedule management / resource management / documentation management / change management / technical management / progress management / status report and such through the WEB. Now, I want to take a closer look at WBS’s role from the relationship between process shortening and quantitative risk assessment.

Suppose you have lines ① and ② as shown in the figure below. You can see that line ② is short because there is a line ①.

Suppose you shortened that short part. What if there is no original line ①?　 Since there is only line ②, we don’t know how long the original line ① is. 　In other words, you can only grasp the magnitude of the shortening of the line ② if you have line ①. If we replace the magnitude of the shortening with a quantitative risk, we have to assess the conditions for the shortening and the risks associated with those conditions; for example, if we use alternatives or substitutes, we have to clear with quality and cost issues.　

So, where must the content of risk identification, avoidance methods, post-implementation evaluation methods, and evaluation be written when using alternative products, alternative solutions? It is even not the PERT diagram, not the Gantt chart diagram, but the WBS.

In this way, if you try to build a project based on a given process from the beginning, such as the line in ②, you will not be able to quantitatively grasp the risks such as how much you can and cannot deal by the current influential force.  Since the risk avoidance method also starts with “maybe”, you would always end up being the situation later, “Why does the project always ride on a deadlock in the same place?”

Application of the WBS

As you put these in mind, you can see the importance of the WBS. Now, let’s follow a little more concrete example. It was back then a while ago; At the invitation of a former colleague, I got involved in constructing a new factory for a soy sauce company from the planning.

The soy sauce company president has an MBA and had been in the United States for a long time, so he was very particular about the visualisation. The customer wanted to build a factory to make the soy sauce, but he also wanted to sell the product reflecting the customer’s voice and tailoring the soy sauce taste to its needs by creating a worldwide network. To achieve this proposition, we must build a system that enables smooth The first thing we thought about was whether the customer could withstand this business. Although other companies seemed giving presentations in consideration of market research, sales channels and so, our strategy was that We had created the WBS for the process on consumer ordering, production, and sales to see if we could realise the president’s plan so.
 As you guess, we created line ①, as shown in the previous figure.

Based online ①, we created the WBS and a process with the client’s existing resources’ input, then found that there would be a 40% shortage of resources Based on this result, our first presentation was the negative one, “It is difficult to achieve, ” which customers mostly dislike. The president’s opinion on the occasion was, “It is a quite deplorable view, and it is the contractor’s job to plan for the materialisation of the project”.

However, it was later founded out that we were the only ones invited to the second meeting a few weeks later. We then submitted a plan to reduce the 40% resource deficit proposed in the first round to 20%, and construction was carried out and completed. As we deepen our relationship with the client, we got to know what other companies were presenting. After then, As we deepen our relationship with the client, we knew what other companies were presenting.

Right After the first presentation, it was said that other companies had a better reputation. Still, as time went on and they examined the content further, the president himself realised that it was a tower on the sand.

As you can see, the WBS is one tool to visualise your project, but it can be applied to various things.