What is a WBS ? (work breakdown structure)

Why use a work breakdown structure?

There’s no doubt about it: Estimating projects can be confusing and somewhat difficult. 

But creating a project estimate doesn’t have to cause you heartburn. 

Asking questions, analyzing needs, and breaking your scope down into chunks can help.

How to use a work breakdown structure to estimate projects

When you’re comfortable with the overall process of creating a work breakdown structure, you’ll be able to adapt the practice to any project—from moving your house to building a complex database with 75 offshore teams. That’s right, the work breakdown structure will be your friend.

But before you go off and start creating these documents (and on-point estimates), let’s walk through a process that will help ensure a solid, workable estimate.

First, sit down with your team, and list out what you’ll need to deliver to meet your project’s end goal. For instance, if you’re building a new website, your deliverables might include:

• Sitemap
• Wireframes
• Page designs
• Front-end code
• Back-end code

Managing project scope with a quick work breakdown structure

Sometimes you’ll get requests to add to your project scope. 

In that case, you'll need a quick (but solid) estimate to float by a team or a client—just to ensure you’re covering your bases with that new thing. 

Maybe you don’t have the time to pull the team together to run through the steps above, but using a work breakdown structure in this instance to map out a quick set of deliverables can be extremely helpful.

In fact, creating a quick work breakdown structure on your own can be extremely helpful when a client tells you they have X dollars to spend or X days to get something done. 

If you map out your tasks to get to an estimate, you can easily explain what can and cannot be done. 

And, if your estimates are too high, you can lean on your work breakdown structure to negotiate the scope down quickly.