A Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) and a schedule are essential parts of every process, product, and project. The OP³IT’s WBS tools provide major benefits over those commonly used by most organizations by creating and maintaining meaningful schedules and linking the Work Packages of the WBS to both the relevant terminal requirements (requirements without sub-requirements) and schedule tasks.

The WBS defines the project’s scope and it must be simple in order to reap the intended benefits. Many organizations, when creating a WBS, use “post-its” which they put up on a wall with other sub “post-its” to break the effort into reasonable chunks. The decomposition process should stop when you reach the smallest manageable components of the project work, called Work Packages. A Work Package is the lowest-level component whose cost and time can be reliably estimated. When the “post-its” process begins to slow down, it is time to transfer the “post-its” to a WBS using OP³IT. Only after the decomposition process has been completed and approved should the project schedule be created.

It is difficult to estimate terminal tasks (tasks without sub-tasks) that require more than a week (40 hours) in duration. If a terminal task takes longer than a week, it needs to be divided into multiple tasks, where no terminal task has duration greater than 40 hours.