What does Work breakdown structure really mean?
Every project has well defined objectives in terms of schedule, scope and resources. It could be something like “Building the biggest aircraft the world has ever seen and deliver to our customer by January 1, 2006 at a unit cost of 100 million USD. This objective is pretty broad and it is not possible for one person to achieve this. It perhaps needs thousands of people possessing various skill sets to accomplish the task. So the scope is broken down further into easily manageable chunks of activities, which can be monitored. This is called a work breakdown structure (WBS). WBS is a hierarchic breakdown of a project or major activity into successive levels, in which each level is a finer breakdown of the preceding level. A WBS of a project looks a lot like the ‘contents’ page of a document that displays the document split into sections, chapters and pages. The items within a specific level of WBS are numbered consecutively (e.g., 1, 2, 3, 4). Each item at the next level is numbered as a
