Mastering Project Decomposition: Essential Skills for Effective Project Management

Understanding Project Deliverables Through Decomposition

Desmond Tutu once wisely said, “There is only one way to eat an elephant: a bite at a time.” What he meant is that everything in life that seems daunting, overwhelming, and even impossible can be accomplished gradually by taking on just a little at a time.

 

The secret is to break down the big challenge into smaller, more manageable tasks. It’s the same with any project – no matter how large and complex – it can be broken down into a series of discreet tasks and deliverables that can be more easily defined and managed. The breaking down of a project in this way is the process of decomposition.

 

Proper decomposition of a project is critical to one of the key roles of the Project Manager – to manage scope.

 

Identify the project.

The very first thing to do when decomposing a project is to identify the project deliverables or milestones. These deliverables will be the elements that you will decompose and break down into tasks to produce work packages. To begin with, the high-level deliverables are defined in a hierarchy.

 

Describe the tasks in detail.

Then, each deliverable and the tasks needed to create it are described in more and more detail until it reaches a point where individual work packages can be identified, described, scheduled, and costs & effort estimated. By this point, we will know enough about each work package to be able to monitor and control it.

 

Project Milestone program

Eventually, you will get to the position of being able to transfer this knowledge into a Project Milestone program. Experience in this process is what the Project Director uses to guide themselves early through the delivery of the project and it is this process that will be used to inform the development of the project schedule, the project budget, the project resourcing plan, and the overarching project delivery plan. Failing to break down a project into all its deliverable components may result in an important aspect of the project being under-resourced or even unnoticed until it is only recognized after the time it should have been commenced.

 

Identifying Project Boundaries

Project Boundaries provide a sense of direction and progress for the project. They identify what is in and out of scope and assist in determining when one milestone is achieved and the next one starts.

 

Project boundaries are normally defined during the initiation phase of the project, before detailed planning begins. As a Project Director on a major project, you need to understand the boundaries of the project. The boundaries define the deliverables and tasks that have been agreed upon with the Project Sponsor. They will usually be defined in the service agreement between the Project Manager and the Project Sponsor. The Project Director, if a technical expert external to the business - in taking this role - has agreed to perform as part of the contract between them and their client.

 

If you get the opportunity to lead a large or high-profile project, don’t let it distract you from the importance of knowing exactly what is in scope – if you fail to do this, you may find yourself committed to far more hours than your service fees cover and the project may run over time and budget because of scope creep and constant changes as new elements get added throughout the delivery. However, if the Project Director correctly establishes the scope and applies scope management with the client - then the agreed scope and only the agreed scope is performed. Changes requested by the client will be controlled and approved via a change management process.

 

The consequences of poor Scope Management can include a hit to the individual's and/or organization's reputation, project cost overruns, project schedule delays, demotivation of the project team, and sustainability risk to the organization.

 

What could be some examples of poor Scope Management that project teams have experienced?

Let’s look at what happens when some of the main steps are missed. Here are some poor Scope Management examples that often occur in projects. What could have been done to avoid these issues!

 

POOR SCOPE MANAGEMENT

Not applying the work breakdown structure to the project management lifecycle.

Uncontrolled changes are called ‘scope creep’ and are often the cause of project budget overruns. A requirement management process seeks to prevent this from happening. The causes/impacts and solutions involved with scope creep provide a compelling argument for the analysis and application of project management through rigorous Scope Management.

 

MORE EXAMPLES ON POOR SCOPE MANAGEMENT

A WBS takes large, complex projects and breaks down the overall scope into more manageable pieces to make it easier to define, plan, schedule, and deliver.

 

Decomposing Deliverables by Organizing the Work

Before the deliverables make it into your Project Milestone program, they need to be identified and then organized into logical groups, for example, project phases or major deliverables.

 

Organizing the work by granularity will make identifying, managing, and delivering the work easier. It also illustrates likely areas of responsibility so you can make sure all the right people have been involved in the work so far.

 

Each level of granularity is noted as a ‘tier’. Tier 1 is the highest level and holds the least amount of detail. It is numbered as follows: 1.0, 2.0, 3.0. As more detail is introduced, the numbers reflect the new level as follows, defining more detail in deliverable 2.0 is noted as 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, etc. when 2.1 is reviewed further, tasks identified become 2.1.1, 2.1.2, 2.1.3, etc.

 

Developing the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) in this way will help define and capture the full scope of the project and the effort required to deliver it in an organized manner. It also improves communications with Stakeholders, Project Sponsor, and Team Members, as well as helping to identify relationship constraints and dependencies and enables more accurate estimation of costs, time/duration, and risk.

 

The WBS effectively defines the detailed scope of the project and the tasks required to deliver it. At this point, the WBS should be cross-referenced to the contract to ensure completeness of deliverables and the absence of scope creep.

 

Deal with Each Deliverable Individually - Looking at Detailed Components

By dealing with deliverables one by one, you eliminate confusion. During this step in the process, each task identified in the WBS is analyzed in more detail and the detailed activities are captured in a WBS Dictionary.

 

The project team members or in the case of this scenario, the Project Director should create the WBS and WBS Dictionary by deconstructing project deliverables into smaller and smaller components until it is possible to reliably estimate the cost and duration of the task and to easily manage it. The level of detail required may vary depending on the size and complexity of the project and from one deliverable to another.

 

The WBS Dictionary captures the identification code of the item, description of work, business area, or organization responsible for delivering the work package, schedule milestones, resources, cost estimates, quality requirements, acceptance criteria, and any technical references.

 

Developing and assigning identification codes to the WBS components helps to identify the relationships between tasks.

 

The Project Director will commence on a drill-down. Drill down is a simple technique for breaking complex problems down into progressively smaller parts. To use the technique, the Project Director will start by writing the problem down on the left-hand side of a large sheet of paper. A little to the right of this, write down a list of points relating to the problem.

 

Once you complete the first deliverable, repeat the process for the second, and so on, until every deliverable and milestone has been broken down to sufficiently estimate duration and cost.

 

Estimate Durations and Arrange Tasks Into Work Packages

The steps in this process are important because the documents created at this stage will be used later in the costing and time management processes to schedule or plan the tasks and to cost each element of the project to determine an overall project cost.

A work package is the lowest component in a work breakdown structure (WBS). A work package is a group of related tasks within a project and is often thought of as sub-projects within a larger project.

 

Estimate Costs

Thoroughly deconstructing project deliverables into smaller components enables reliable cost estimation and management. Continue the breakdown of major elements until adequate cost and duration estimates for each work package can be determined. Organize the high level into a hierarchy to create the skeleton for the Work Breakdown Structure.

 

Each individual work package should be allocated to a Work Package Manager (WPM). The WPM will define the work package in sufficient detail to be identified, resourced, scheduled, and costs & effort estimated.

 

By decomposing into work packages, the Project Lead will be able to budget the project accurately. Failure to break a deliverable down into all its component elements and tasks can result in a significant risk to a project being overlooked until it’s too late.

 

For example, a decision may be made to “buy-in” a premade piece of equipment, and its supply may be arranged to coincide with the project's planned completion date without full consideration of the physical time and effort required to complete the installation and commissioning of the equipment, which can only occur after other trades have completed their work and no other work is being undertaken. The late realization of this work requirement can impact not just the delivery time and installation of the equipment but also all the other trades that must be finalized before the work can commence.

 

Some tasks will have costs dependent upon the time; other tasks will require particular resources that have a cost involved.

 

Understanding how a project breaks down into a series of deliverables, which in turn are made up of a series of tasks, is one of the key skills for a Project Manager. It makes the project definition and delivery planning process possible. It helps identify priorities, risks, and vulnerabilities and gives the Project Manager a framework within which to manage scope and change and to deal with the many pressures that impact a project throughout its lifecycle. A project without a WBS is going to appear as indigestible as that elephant.