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Manage the Project Scope for Project (and CAPM!) Success

5. Create the Work Breakdown Structure

I've mentioned the work breakdown structure an awful lot throughout this course. So now it's time to really define what the WBS is. It's a decomposition of the project scope. And this leads me to one of my favourite jokes about project management, which is that it's like Beethoven. For a long time, Beethoven was composing, but now he is decomposing. All right, I didn't tell you it was a good joke. It's just my favourite joke. All right, so let's talk about decomposing the project scope into the work breakdown structure. Creating the work breakdown structure is thus the process of breaking down the project scope. Now, you'll never forget that it's deliverables-oriented. It's not on the activity list. This is a deliverables-oriented list.

So, if we were building a house and disassembled it, it would say, "This is our house project." Then we have the first floor and then the second floor, and maybe the landscaping or whatever the case may be. And we would take the first floor and break it down again. We've got the kitchen, the master bedroom, the living room, and so on. And then we could take the kitchen and break it down. We could say we have the appliances, the cabinets, the countertops, the flooring, the lighting, and so on, and we can continue to break all of those elements down. So it is a decomposition of the scope into the individual deliverables that make up the end result of the project. So it's deliverables-oriented. It's not an activity. It's not installing the cabinet tops. It's not painting the walls. It's the things that you get as a result of the project.

It's a major component of the scope baseline. It's used in a lot of our project planning tools. We've already seen it creep in a couple of times. It helps to visualise the project and define exactly what's in scope, and then it serves as a deterrent to scope change. Because if it's not in the WBS, we can't create it without an approved change request. Let's look at the eDO for creating the work breakdown structure, the scope management plan, and the project scope statement, because that's what we're breaking down. The requirements and documentation to assure that we have captured everything in the WBS and in our requirements And then we have EEF and OPA. So you've got some rules on how you decompose, or maybe you have some templates that you can use from past projects or forms that are kind of prepopulated if you're doing the same type of project over and over. Tools and techniques I already gave you the one-dimensional decomposition and expert judgment, my outputs.

I receive the scope baseline. Finally, the scope and baseline come together. The scope statement, the work breakdown structure, and the WBS dictionary are all attached to the WBS. The WBS dictionary, like a dictionary, contains all of the items, all of the words that make up the work breakdown structure. and then a definition of what those things are. We'll talk more about the WBS dictionary in a few minutes. And then you might have project document updates. WBS creation. As I've already given you a sense of this, The major project deliverables are identified. So like the house, you break it down into smaller and smaller, more specific elements. It is the WBS's structure and organization. You could do this like I did, by the first floor, second floor, and so on. You could do it by phases of the project. There is no such thing as a right or wrong way. It's just a way to organise all of the things that contribute to the project scope. Typically, you begin with upper-level components and work your way down to smaller lower-level components. The smallest item in your work breakdown structure is called a work package. It is the work package that corresponds to the activities on your activity list.

So we're getting ready for Module 6 in the pinboard, where we'll talk about time, the activities list, and time, as well as a little bit about cost and going with those work packages. It's possible to assign some identification codes to components using a code of account, a unique identifier. We'll look at that in the next slide, and it helps to verify scope decomposition that you've truly decomposed everything to the appropriate depth and detail for project execution. So let's look at a WBS. There you go. There's a work breakdown structure. This is from the pinback. So we have the value management system, project, or whatever that may be. And then you can see they have upper-level components, and then they break it down again and again. The code of accounts is that unique identifier you see, like "if we find," I want you to find "1132" in this WBS. So you could look at, okay, it's one, so you'd find that, and then you'd find one, three, and then there's one, three, and two. So that's an account code.

It's just a unique identifier. It distinguishes each element from the other elements in your WBS. It can also be used for communication. If I'm in the office and you're in the field building a house, you could call me and say, "Hey Joe, what's the exact depth of this nook for a TV?" So I could say, "Oh, it's supposed to be six inches." Well, with that conversation, we're not really clear. Do you mean the TV for the master bedroom or the one that is in the den downstairs? But if you say, "What's the depth of the TV for the deliverable?" One, one, three, four. Okay, I know exactly which one you're talking about. So that's the code of accounting.

Now, a control account is where we say we have X amount of time and X amount of money for a particular deliverable. And I don't need to know all of the details right now. So we create a planning package. So let me break that down a little bit for you. Back to building that house in your kitchen You know that in your kitchen you're going to have countertops, cabinets, and appliances. In fact, we know that in the kitchen you're going to spend, let's say, $100,000. A large house, a beautiful kitchen Sounds fantastic. Okay, so you've set aside $100,000 in that kitchen just for the kitchen budget. That's a control account, sometimes called a control account plan or a cap. It's an amount of money set aside just for the kitchen.

Now, within the kitchen, you know you're going to have tile floors. You've already decided on tile floors, and those floors are going to cost you $10,000 or whatever. So now, in your control account plan, you have $90,000 to buy cabinets, countertops, appliances, lighting, and so on. So it's kind of like a mini-budget for your project for just that one part of it. And that's a control account plan. You don't know right now. You haven't decided yet what type of cabinets you're going to install. Well, we need to know what type of cabinets you want by February 1, or else it's going to affect our project delivery date. So you have a deadline of February 1 to decide what type of cabinets you want in your kitchen. That is a planning package that you have to choose the cabinets for. So you still haven't done it yet. We don't need to know the day the cabinets are going to go in that kitchen, but we won't know until February 1.

So it allows us to go ahead and begin working on the project with the understanding that the decision will be made by February 1. So we have a planning package in our WBS. All right, a lot of information there. Let's go ahead and move forward. You have this take-ahead project, so adapt the WBS template to your current project. So much historical information If your company does the same types of projects over and over, where you have a lot of the same deliverables, you could use a prepopulated template. So your template might have, you know, the things you deliver, and then you can just very quickly adapt it for your current project. Sometimes a work breakdown structure is just called the WBT. Be aware of that, though. The WBT can sometimes mean web-based training. So just be aware of that on your exam. They won't use abbreviations.

They're going to say a work breakdown structure template. The WBS dictionary goes with the work breakdown structure. It defines all of the elements of the work breakdown structure. It defines the work package's attributes. So what are the materials needed? Who's going to be assigned to that deliverable? I shouldn't say "activity" in relation to that deliverable. How much will it cost? How long does it take? What are the requirements attached to that deliverable? And then it follows the same nomenclature that you use in the work breakdown structure. As a result, it adheres to WBS usage and the WBS dictionary. A lot of things go into the dictionary. Remember that code of account identification, a description of the work, the thing you're recreating, the assumptions and constraints, who's the responsible party, and the list of scheduled milestones.

So do these contribute to a particular milestone? Any associated schedule activities So installing the cabinets then allows the countertops to be installed. What resources are required? So resources aren't just people. It could also be materials, equipment, facilities, and things like that. What's the estimated cost to create this particular deliverable? Quality requirements, acceptance criteria, technical references, and any contract information if you're repartnering with a vendor The scope baseline, as I mentioned, is these three items: the project scope statement, the work breakdown structure, and the WBS dictionary. Your WBS will be a big input to a lot of processes, and it's going to follow us around for the remainder of the project. You're going to see the WBS and WBS dictionary quite a bit. All right, good job finishing this lecture. Next, we're going to talk about validating the project scope. So I'll see you in the following lecture.

6. Validate Project Scope

In this lecture, we're going to talk about scope validation. Scope validation is really about the customer accepting the work that we've created. Validation happens at the end of the project and throughout the project, at the end of each phase. Scope validation is an inspection-driven process that leads to customer acceptance of what we've created. This is from PMBOK Five. The process validates scope. As I mentioned, it's an inspection-driven process. The customer inspects the project work. It's done at the end of each phase and at the end of the project. You might know scope validation as a review, a walkthrough, or an audit. And as you know, it leads to formal acceptance. Now, I want to go back to this idea about scope validation happening throughout the project. If I'm building a house for you, you're not going to just write me a check and say, "I'll see you at the end." Joe. When the house is done, you're going to periodically come by and inspect the work. In addition, we have city inspectors that are acting on your behalf to ensure that I'm doing the work properly. So they're going to inspect the foundation, the electrical, the plumbing, and so on. So validating the scope is done by the customer and, in some cases, on behalf of the customer of the project. For the EDOs to validate scope, we have several inputs. You need the project management plan, the requirements documentation, because that's what we're inspecting against the requirements traceability matrix so that I can see every deliverable that's been created and where itis in the project.

Deliverables that have been verified to show that this is what we've created and what the customer inspects And then we have work performance data—the raw data about the work that we've done. It is inspection-driven. That's your primary tool and technique, and in some cases, you might have some of those group decisionmaking techniques. The customer accepts the work after it produces a validated scope. So we have accepted deliverables. It's possible to have a change request, so there could be an error. So we need to repair some defect repair. Well, that might require a change request for the project. It's also possible that the customer sees what's been created and likes it, so they want to add more things to the project.

So a change request could come out of this process. We begin with work performance data or input. We investigate. So now we have work performance information, and then you might have project document updates, depending on what happens with those change requests in your project. inspecting the work. So whenever you see these verbs or these activities, this is a good indication that you're doing scope validation with a customer. Alternatively, these activities are carried out by stakeholders. They're measuring the work. They're examining testing. They're validating. Obviously, they're doing a review, a walkthrough, or an audit. I want to be really clear here about scope validation and quality control because it's easy to get these two mixed up. The quality control that we'll talk about—modulated and pinball—and quality are also inspection-driven. Quality control, on the other hand, is something that the project manager, project team, and possibly a quality control department do to keep mistakes out of the hands of the customer.

They do the work to find mistakes and ensure quality in what we present to the customer. So quality control will also do these same activities, but they are done without the customer and before scope validation. So that's important to know for your exam—that scope validation is done with the customer and quality control is done before the customer. In QC, you keep mistakes away from the customer. Scope validation: We want the customer to see what we've created and accept it. And that's the whole goal—to formally accept the project's work. Now we're after the accepted deliverables for each phase of the whole project. We want the customer to sign off on what we've created. And, as you may be aware, change requests may be an output. There will be an output from a lot of our processes. And then the little talk I just gave about validation and quality control was really important for your exam. Alright, that's it. Good job finishing this little talk about the scope of the validation process.

7. Control the Project Scope

Do you remember back in module four, a long time ago, we talked about project integration management and integrated change control? Remember, at integrated change control, we're looking at changes that may come from scope, time, cost, or contract. Well, in the next few chapters, and then again, we'll go into procurement, we'll see how to control the scope, control the schedule, control the cost, and then eventually, we'll get into procurement and see how changes are handled there. So we're really carrying on that conversation of project integration management to talk about controlling the scope here in Chapter 5 of the PIN box. So by controlling the project scope, you must ensure that you're giving the customer exactly what was promised. This process has several questions that we ask when we see a change in our scope.

First off, are the changes agreed upon? This is important from a couple of different points of view. First off, it's a proposed change that we would like to add some features to that software that you're developing, or we want to add some things to this house that you're constructing, or whatever the case may be. So are the changes agreed upon? If they are, then the change is likely to be approved. What if the change has already happened? What if your project team added features to the software, or they added things to that house that you're building and the customer didn't ask for those things, or they painted the room blue when it was supposed to be yellow? So that's a change that's already happened, and we have to manage that change. That's a change in scope. So what do we do with that change?

How do I manage that existing change? If a customer proposes that instead of carpet, I want tile in this particular room so we can approve that change, we will accommodate it with time and cost. But then how do we get that change into the project plan? Because that change obviously affects our scope and, as I just mentioned, our time and cost. But other things are affected as well. Remember, with integrated change control, quality could be affected, and HR could be affected. We need the resources to install the tile communication. We have to communicate that change throughout the project. Does the change in tile introduce any risk for the success of the project and procurement is changed? And then stakeholders: if the customer is asking for a change, it's pretty direct, but there may be other stakeholders with whom we need to communicate that change too.

So controlling the scope, these are all critical questions that we'll ask whenever a scope change occurs unintentionally or when a customer or stakeholder requests a change. And then we have to go through integrated change control. This process has several inputs. the project management plan, because that directs how we control all of those knowledge areas that I just rattled off a moment ago. Requirements, documentation. Because if we're changing scope, we're likely also changing our requirements. So this is back to configuration management and features and functions. The requirement traceability matrix needs to be updated. Work performance data will likely be updated. Organizational process assets will be an input. Variance analysis will be one of our tools and techniques here. If the change has already happened, then we have to do an invariance analysis on that change.

So what did it do to our scope, what did it do to our time, and what will it do to our cost? and so on. And then if it's a proposed change, then we're doing some analysis of that change through integrated change control, and what effect does it have on the project as a whole? Our outputs are here: we have work performance information; we have our raw data; we analyse it; and now we have performance information. Obviously, we have a change request. As a result, a change request may result in controlling scope. You might have to update the project management plan because if the change is approved, we'll update the plan to reflect that. Project document updates could be an output here because we may have to update our different baselines, and then organisational process assets could also be updated. Variance analysis was one of our tools and techniques for controlling the scope. We're looking at things like performance measurements, so we have a variance in time and cost. What's the magnitude of the variation that has happened because of an unapproved change?

So how far did that pull us in terms of time and cost? Think about gold plating or Scope Creek. So if those changes have happened, what does it do to our time and cost? Determine the cause and degree of variance, and then do we need corrective or preventive action to fix a defect or fix something that's out of scope, and then to prevent those things from happening again? If the change request is approved, we will have to update the scope statement to reflect the fact that the change affects the project scope statement. Then we have to update the scope, which of course will cause us to update the product scope, the project plan, the work breakdown structure, and the WBS dictionary. It's always a good idea that when we update the scope statement, we also do some versioning to keep the scope statement current.

And so there's no confusion as to what version of the scope this approved change also affects, the changes also affect the scope baseline. Recall it. The scope baseline is the scope statement, the WBS, and the WBS dictionary. This could also have an impact on cost baselines in schedules. If a scope change request is approved, we will have to spend more money and more time. So we reflect that in our baseline. It's possible that you have a change request to take things out of scope. Consider that as well. So if we take things out of scope, that could also cause us to update our cost and schedule baselines. All right, good job reaching the end of this section and module five in the pin box about managing the scope. This brings us to the end of this section. And so next up, I have a little learning game for you. And I know you want to go and do that. Now. I'll see you coming up real soon.

8. Section Wrap

Great job reaching the end of this section on project scope management, one of the most important knowledge areas for any project manager. We began our conversation by talking about collecting requirements. We must meet the requirements. Requirements are both a concern and a strength. They set expectations, they guide us in our activities and time and cost, and they really are involved in all facets of the project. So to collect requirements, we talked about business requirements as they support the higher-level needs of the organization, stakeholder requirements, the more specific needs, and solution requirements, the very specific needs. We looked at functional and non-functional requirements in this section.

Remember those functional requirements; they're all about how this thing is supposed to work. Nonfunctional requirements are environmental conditions or qualities such as safety and security of the environment in which this thing will exist. We also looked at transition requirements and an operational transfer plan. How do you get from the project owning it to it now being part of operations? What are the project requirements? So what actions, processes, conditions, and procedures must you or your project team take? And then we have quality requirements as to what constitutes quality. And of course, we'll talk more about quality. When we get into Chapter 8 of the Pinball on Project Quality Management, some ways to collect requirements We talked about focus groups and facilitated workshops, and it was really fun when we talked about prototypes, I know it was fun.I just like to call them prototypes. Prototypes are like a mock up.

So we had those throwaway prototypes, which you would mock up, or a functional prototype, where we could take this prototype and actually begin using it as part of our solution, or storyboarding, where you would draw out a solution of how things would work. You can help visualise what the requirements should be for your project. Then we actually went about writing the scope statement. The scope statement really outlines the boundaries of what we will and will not do as part of this project. So it sets boundaries and expectations. We want to get rid of assumptions. Assumptions are going to become risks if they are proven to be false. This helps us create the scope baseline that I hinted at in our introduction. However, the scope-based lines refer to three things: the project scope statement, your work breakdown structure, and the WBS dictionary. The project scope statement is all about creating a scope description and defining our acceptance criteria.

How do we know when we're done? What are the deliverables, and what's excluded? What about assumptions and constraints? That's all part of the project scope. We went through the whole process of creating the work breakdown structure. So I know you have that mastered. Now, the WBS is a visualisation of the decomposition of the project scope. It's not the activity list; it's the things that we will create as part of the scope. It defines what is included in the scope and validates it. It is an inspection-driven process that's done by the customers.

The goal is acceptance. Remember that quality control is also inspection-driven, but it happens without the customer. And the goal of quality control is to keep mistakes out of the customers hands. So we'll see quality control coming up in a few sections here when we get into Chapter 8 of the pinball on quality management. However, the scope of validation is similar, but it occurs after quality control. Control scope. We want to ensure that we are preventing unapproved changes from coming into the project. So we want to say that changes have to follow our workflow, go through integrated change control, and have a logical process and a logical approach to be approved or declined. If changes happen without going through our process and we have a problem now, we have to manage that change.

Will we incorporate it? Do we have to reverse it? Is this going to drive up costs and time? So then, do we have to reflect that as a variance in our baseline? If it were an unapproved change, of course; if it were an approved change, we don't have a variance. And that was one of the last conversations we had in this section, which was all about variance analysis, performance measurement, the magnitude and degree of variation in cost, and what we were going to do about it. All right, you're doing great. You're really moving forward. Continue to do the hard work. Continue to do what it takes. I know you can do this, and you should know that as well.

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