S4 | EP053 - The Work Plan and the Work Breakdown Structure

A work plan is exactly what it sounds like.

Right, it's a plan of what you're going to do in whatever comes next.

And next can be any stage.

You might be heading into design, into tendering, or into construction.

Whatever the stage, the work plan is the list of activities you're actually going to perform to get through it.

Nothing mysterious.

It's the to-do list for a whole phase, written down on purpose.

Inside that work plan sits a more structured idea, and this one has a name worth knowing for the exam.

It's the work breakdown structure, the WBS.

The work breakdown structure is simply how you organize the work, and it organizes it into packages.

Well, let's make that concrete with a design phase.

If you're designing a project, your big packages might be the architectural drawings, the structural drawings, the mechanical drawings, and so on.

One package per discipline, per drawing set.

That's the top level.

But you don't stop there.

Under each package, you break the work down further.

Take the architectural drawings.

Underneath that, you'd have your partial plans, your overall plans, you know, your elevations, your sections, and the rest.

And you can keep going.

The elevations themselves break down again into interior elevations, exterior elevations, and detail elevations if you've got them.

So the picture is a tree, big packages at the top, splitting into smaller and smaller pieces as you go down.

And the natural question is, sort of, when do you stop? You could break a building down practically forever.

Here's the rule of thumb.

Keep breaking a package down until the smallest task is roughly 8% of that package.

So if the whole architectural set is your 100%, you keep splitting until the little tasks at the bottom are each around 8% of that 100.