Work Breakdown Structures Cheat Sheet – Everything You Need to Know
WWork breakdown structures may seem daunting but they are, in fact, quite simple. Here is everything you will need to know to create your wedding work breakdown structure.
What it is
The work breakdown structure (WBS) allows you to visualize the scope of your wedding planning by using a tree diagram structure. The top level of the diagram contains the phases of the wedding plan. The phases then get decomposed into deliverables, the deliverables decomposed into sub-deliverables, and the sub-deliverables decomposed into activities. The WBS includes all the details of the wedding plan, not just the obvious parts like ceremony, reception, honeymoon, etc… If the details are not part of your WBS they will be considered to be outside the scope (not included in) your wedding.
Purpose
You may be saying, “I just created a list of deliverables in the Wedding Scope Statement. Isn’t that good enough?” Or, “The Knot has a to-do list, can’t I just use that”. Well, you could leave out all the details and complete each part of your wedding planning holding on by the seat of your pants. But I would assume since you are reading this blog you don’t want to do that, you want to plan your wedding with project management techniques. Don’t skip this step; it is one of the most important in the entire process. If you need some additional reasons, here you go. The WBS will help you:
- Define the scope for your wedding
- Create a list of activities to be completed
- Realize what vendors will be needed
- Determine how long planning your wedding will take
- Determine how much money your wedding will cost
- Determine risks
- Create a project schedule
Are you convinced yet?
How To
- Start with figuring out your phases. To give you an example my phases are: pre-wedding, wedding day, and post-wedding.
- Find your Wedding Scope Statement (see I wasn’t making you create all these documents just for fun) and categorize all the deliverables you listed under your phases. These deliverables could be bridal shower, rehearsal, guest accommodations, etc.
- If you feel like you need to add more detail you can decompose the deliverables into sub-deliverables and the sub-deliverables into activities. For example you could break the rehearsal into sub-categories of ceremony and dinner. Then you could break the dinner into activities of food, decoration, and entertainment. You could even break down the activities further if needed.
Your WBS will look something like this:
Keep in Mind
- You shouldn’t have any one-to-one relationships. If you have any of these it either means the element doesn’t need to be there or it needs a sub-deliverable or activity. For example you wouldn’t want to have the deliverable of “Guest Accommodations” and only have one sub-deliverable under it like “Hotel”. Either take the sub-deliverable of “Hotel” out or add a sub-deliverable like “Welcome Bags”.
- Each element should be made up of the child elements below it. So, in my diagram above the “Ceremony” and “Dinner” elements make up the “Rehearsal” element. I wouldn’t put an element like “Hotel” under “Rehearsal” because it doesn’t have anything to do with that deliverable.
- Activities are the elements of the WBS that must be performed to accomplish the deliverable. For instance, I have to line up food, buy decorations, and figure out what kind of entertainment to have for the planning of the rehearsal dinner to be accomplished.
More information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_breakdown_structure
