ProjectLibre : Managing projects using Work Breakdown Structures in ProjectLibre

This is Marc O’Brien, one of the co-founders of ProjectLibre. Myself and Co-Founder Laurent Chretienneau have been in the project software industry for many years. I actually started in the mainframe days with a company called PSDI and a mainframe product PROJECT/2 that ran on IBM 3090 mainframes or the latest innovation at the time Vax/VMS computers. They were command line programs and were million dollar deployments targeted primarily for the Defense and Electricity industries. Very large projects with war room walls covered in plotted paper of the project schedules. “Integrated Cost/Schedule Control Systems” required Earned Value Management and other techniques which are not as widely used in general business. I will have a separate video on Earned Value management costing in ProjectLibre but today will focus on the Work Breakdown Structure which is widely used and effective from a project manager’s toolkit for tracking project cost. The Work Breakdown Structure referred from now on as the WBS is the Project broken down into successive levels until the proper level of project detail has been defined. The Project is broken down into Summary tasks, Sub-tasks, detailed tasks and work packages. This is an important check point when establishing the project plan to ensure you are tracking at the appropriate detail level. As the project progresses the WBS framework is used to compare schedule/performance with the Budget established for each level. The cost data rolls up the WBS tree and summarizes at each level up the structure. Cost accounts, variance and earned value can all be tracked. It should be measurable based on progress and responsibilities assigned. The WBS is another effective tool for both managing the project and for reporting purposes to the stakeholders or customer at certain summary levels.