MGMT 625 Week 3 DB Forum 2 Thread Example

Discussion Board Forum 2: Thread

MGMT 625 Project Planning & Scheduling, Discussion Board Forum 2: Thread

Thread by [Student Name]

The prompt and the county's records project are composites standing in for the course's own forum; Wilson's text, the PMBOK Guide, the scholarly sources and Scripture are real; the requirements follow Liberty's public course guide for MGMT 625.

Our county recorder's office set out two years ago to scan and index every property deed, mortgage and plat recorded since 1921, about 2.1 million pages, and to put them online for title researchers within eighteen months. The original work breakdown structure was organized the way our office is organized: scanning, indexing, quality control and information technology, each with its own list of tasks. Six months in, the scanning team reported 640,000 pages done and the indexing team reported 400,000 records keyed, but no one could say how many record books were finished, searchable and online. The commissioners asked for a percentage complete, and the honest answer was that we did not know. Worse, the two teams were working on different decades: scanning had raced ahead through the 1950s and 1960s because those books were in the best condition, while indexing was still keying the 1920s, so thousands of scanned pages sat unindexed and unusable. Each department was busy and productive, and the project as a whole had delivered almost nothing a title researcher could use.

Globerson (1994) argued that the way a work breakdown structure divides a project, for example by product, by function or by phase, shapes how the team conceives of and controls the project. Our functional structure made each department's activity visible and the project's result invisible. We rebuilt the WBS around deliverables: each record series, deeds, mortgages and plats, divided by decade, with each work package defined as a set of records scanned, indexed, checked and published. The first work package, deeds from 1921 to 1930, was a finished product a title researcher could use. Progress became simple to report: by the end of month eight, nineteen of sixty-four work packages were complete. The new structure also changed how the teams worked together, because scanning and indexing now had to finish the same decade before either could claim credit for it, which ended the race between departments.

Jung and Woo (2004) proposed a flexible WBS for integrating cost and schedule control and noted that the effort of collecting detailed data is one of the main barriers to that integration. Our deliverable-based packages lowered that burden: instead of tracking thousands of daily tasks, we tracked sixty-four packages, each with a budget and a scheduled finish. The PMBOK Guide's 100 percent rule, that a WBS should contain all of the project's work and nothing else, also caught a gap: the original structure had no place for redacting Social Security numbers in older documents, a required step that no department had owned (Project Management Institute, 2017). Wilson (2014) treats the WBS as the foundation on which the schedule and the cost baseline are built, and our experience bears that out; once the structure was right, the schedule followed.

When Nehemiah rebuilt Jerusalem's wall, the work was assigned section by section, each family repairing the stretch beside its own house, so that every part of the wall had an owner (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Nehemiah 3:1-32). Nehemiah's wall was divided by what would be finished, not by who held which tools. That is the logic of a deliverable-based WBS. We finished the project in month twenty, two months late but with every package traceable.

Classmates: how is the WBS on your current project organized, and can you tell from it what is actually finished?

References

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

Globerson, S. (1994). Impact of various work-breakdown structures on project conceptualization. International Journal of Project Management, 12(3), 165-171. https://doi.org/10.1016/0263-7863(94)90032-9

Jung, Y., & Woo, S. (2004). Flexible work breakdown structure for integrated cost and schedule control. Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 130(5), 616-625. https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)0733-9364(2004)130:5(616)

Project Management Institute. (2017). A guide to the project management body of knowledge (PMBOK guide) (6th ed.).

Wilson, R. (2014). A comprehensive guide to project management schedule and cost control. Pearson FT Press.