ABSTRACT
Projects of differing sizes, types and complexities do not lend themselves to cookie cutter approaches but, that said, there are certain elements that are common to most of them, such as lessons learned, project charters, project management plans, Gantt charts, work breakdown structures, and network diagrams. One of the most important aspects of project management is what people learn from their prior successes, failures, mistakes and experiences made at different points in the lifecycles of our past projects. A tool commonly applied for that purpose is the “work breakdown structure” (WBS). The WBS is a multipurpose management tool used to breakdown the work tasks of large projects into smaller, more manageable elements called work groups to easily communicate the work involved to execute the project, and it is used in one form or another on all but the simplest of projects.
