Fine WBS Tool

Fine WBS Tool

I would like to share a software tool with you, my fellow project managers and consultants, which I have found to be very helpful. I am not getting paid by any company to endorse certain products (wish I were!), but when I find a good tool, I like to share. This particular tool helps create easy and professional Work Breakdown Structures, and is called WBS Chart Pro by Critical Tools. You can find it at http://www.criticaltools.com/.

What I like about this tool is that it allows me to fully utilize the benefits of the WBS. For example, I was hired to oversee a project recently where it was estimated that the work would take 3 months with 5 people, including me, working on it part-time at approximately 25% or less of their time. After meeting with them and brainstorming what the project work would entail, we had a pretty good list of activities. I suggested we start with ‘quick hits’ to show progress and generate excitement about our project, and then move on to other activities. So far, so good.

After breaking out the work behind the so-called quick hits, I listed the activities in MSProject. The neat thing about the WBS Chart Pro software is that it automatically takes what you have in MSProject and it creates a diagram that looks like an organizational chart, except that instead of people’s names and positions, it shows the work of your project hierarchically. This happens with literally the push of a button, which is the icon that the software loads onto your MSProject screen. Sure, Visio will create a WBS, but it is manually intensive, and certainly won’t automatically update itself if the list of activities changes. Here, if you update MSProject, the WBS is automatically updated as well. You can even make changes in WBS Chart Pro and they will be reflected back in MSProject, although I personally choose not to do that. You can choose from various views in WBS Chart Pro, showing as much or as little detail for each activity as you like.

Going back to the project I was describing, after loading the work behind only the quick hits, the WBS that popped up was 7 pages wide and 2 pages deep. Only then was it painfully obvious to the team that our schedule and resources were extremely unrealistic. The quick hits alone turned out to be their own project, and would themselves take longer than the 3 months and need more attention than the 5 part time people.

After showing the WBS to the sponsor to help him visually understand our predicament, we then scaled back the number of quick hits yet again to better reflect reality. We called this the Focused Phase I. The new WBS of this focused effort fit on one page. Now, visually, everyone could see that we finally had a realistic list of activities and schedule.

In this case, the tool helped us communicate with a well-intentioned but absent sponsor. It also helped some of the more ‘rosy estimators’ on the team face reality. They could no longer say, ‘Sure we can do it all’ when the graphic so plainly said otherwise.

Critical Tools also has a product called Pert Chart EXPERT which will display a PERT chart in fewer pages than MSProject will. I bought that software package, too, and it does work well, but I have to say that I haven’t really used it like I do WBS Chart Pro.

Have you tried WBS Chart Pro? What do you think of it? Have you found other helpful tools? Please share them with us. Together, we are all better. Thanks!

Vicki Wrona, PMP®is the founder and President of Forward Momentum, LLC, an 8(a) consulting and training company found at www.forwardmomentum.net. She has been managing projects and mentoring project managers for the past 20 years in both the private and public sectors, in manufacturing, service, and IT. She is an instructor and course director for Global Knowledge, and developed GK’s PMP® Exam Prep Boot Camp course, which is part of the program that won the Project Management Institute’s® Professional Development Product of the Year Award in 2007. She has trained over 3,300 professionals, including over 1,600 on the PMP® exam. Currently, she is serving on PMI®’s PMBOK® Guide 4th edition creation and review team in general, and a content reviewer specifically on the Communication and Procurement knowledge areas.