Milestones are simple. They're a very powerful tool. And for small projects that may be all of the planning tool that you need. But for anything other than the simplest projects, perhaps the most fundamental tool, the core of what tools you're going to use, is what's called a work breakdown structure. This tool is underused by inexperienced project managers who think it's highly technical, highly complex, and not really needed. In fact, that couldn't be further from the truth because it's not technical at all.

It's very simple, and it's enormously valuable and practical. So what is a work breakdown structure? Well, first have the confidence to know that it actually does what the words say it does, it breaks the work down into a structure. And that's exactly what it's intended to do. It does nothing more nor less. It takes the project and it divides projects into big chunks.

And the first decision for you to make as a project manager is what big chunk structure makes sense to you. In this project. Often we use functional trunks or use geographical chunks or use timezone chunks for our project. With the projects I'm going to illustrate is very simply one of repairing a kitchen or renovating a kitchen. So for that, of course, we're going to use kitchen chunks, we're not going to schedule it into time chunks or into regions or, but more to do with functions, the professionalism we'll look at the ceiling, the floor, the walls and the units that are going to go into your Kitchen. So those are our big chunks and then it further breaks down the work that's needed on each chunk intersections, and we keep going down to lower and lower levels of detail.

So let's have a look at a simple work breakdown structure our kitchen here are four chunks of work. And then following one example, we go down that route to break it down into finer levels of detail. Now the obvious question is where do we stop in terms of level of detail? And the answer is simple. You stop at the level of which the person who will do the work sees the task as one straightforward task that they understand fully. So for an experienced plumber, fitting a sink would be as far as we need to go.

For a brand new apprentice doing this for their first time, we might say what the plumbing consists of about fitting the pipes and tightening the joints and testing the joints and making sure the seals work. So we would go down to finer levels of detail for less experienced people. Or if we need a more precise audit trail because there are health and safety or price sensitivities as far as the value of our business goes. The second thing to note, which is absolutely critical is nobody in their right mind would draw a work breakdown structure in the way that I've illustrated it here. It would take a huge amount of paper and very small writing to document even the smallest real world project we actually do is we turn this diagram into a series of lines a list and we do this by numbering across the top.

These verticals that flow from the major To division two names workstreams. So we've got workstream 1234. And everything that flows from these work streams is 1.1 1.2 2.1 2.2, and so on, and we work our way down. And so the most sophisticated tool that you need, absolutely need is something like a word processor that enables you to create indented lists. Yes, there are even more sophisticated tools that you can use, where you can do a work breakdown structure with the simplest software tools. Now, a work breakdown structure at its bottom level, gives you an item by item description of your scope.

So as we've moved from a definition stage, where we document our scope as a list, we're now getting a very precise and clustered list that documents our scope absolutely precisely. work breakdown structure is enormously useful, because not only does it give us a real analysis of the tasks we need to do and how they're clustered. And it helps us to make sure we don't forget anything. But crucially, it also gives birth to a range of twin or related tools. For example, we can add a cost to each item at the bottom of our work breakdown structure, and then accumulate those costs up through the work breakdown structure to create a budget in a format known as a cost breakdown structure. And the lovely thing about a cost breakdown structure is it allows us to track expenditure against plan when each item of work is finished.

It's also worth mentioning that again, in the UK, we tend to draw it back and sketches based on the work that needs to be done. The tasks in the US now more often drawn based on the product or the deliverable, so it will break it down into its component parts rather than into its component tasks. So we build it. Both are equivalent in the UK, what many American practitioners would call a work breakdown structure, we would call it a product breakdown structure. But it amounts to the same thing. You can also allocate people to each task or to the development of each product on our work breakdown structure.

And when we allocate people in, we get an organization chart isn't known as an organization breakdown structure. Didn't go further Of course we won't, but you can go further and link stakeholders to each action to each product. It's cross stakeholder breakdown structure, you can identify risks that flow from each product or from each task to credit risk breakdown structure, both structured ways to access and identification of stakeholders or of risks, more than most projects need in terms of rigor. The correct way to develop a work breakdown structure here top down. However, on smaller projects, many project managers find that brainstorming all the tasks and then clustering them works better for the way they think. My top tip is this, because it is absolutely crucial that you miss nothing and that you don't have duplicates.

Expose your work breakdown structure to scrutiny from trusted colleagues who can challenge what you might have missed. And if you can't do that, then whether you develop your work breakdown structure top down, or bottom up, put it into a draw. And then a couple of days later, discipline yourself to do the whole exercise again, but the other way round. And often that process of thinking in a different way, will identify some of the things many of the things that you may have missed the first time but don't shortcut it. Work Breakdown structures are a valuable tool for project managers with experience they will Know that you can't properly manage a project without a work breakdown structure