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This Guest paper, originally published at the 2012 PMI Global Congress Proceedings in Vancouver, Canada, was submitted for publication in February 2021
It is copyright to Eric Uyttewaal, 2021.
Published here May 2021
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Work Breakdown Orientations: Good and BadThe way the program is broken down is very important. In our opinion, it is important to minimize cross-project dependencies and create autonomous teams as much as possible. The breakdown must be oriented to deliverables rather than to departments, phases, products or other alternatives. At the SanDisk program, we created a standard high-level breakdown structure for the subprojects that consists of:
- Level 0 — Subprojects: Major component of the new product: Use nouns (without verbs);
e.g., ASIC, Firmware, Parts, Test Software, Reliability, Tested Parts
- Level 1 — Subcomponents: in the major component: Use nouns (without verbs);
e.g., for ASIC: Multiple Subsystems and Top Design
- Level 2 — Function: Use nouns (without verbs);
e.g., for ASIC: Logic Design, Physical Design, FPGA Design (Field Programmable Gate Array), Documentation, Verification, Test Preparation, Package, Foundry, and Design Validation
- Level 3 — Tangible Deliverables: Use nouns (without verbs);
e.g., For ASIC: Preliminary, Trial and Final RTL; Preliminary, Trial and Final Synthesis and Layout; RTL and Gate Level Verification and multiple FPGA releases.
- Lowest Level — Work packages/Activities/ Tasks: Use verbs to describe the activities.
As you can see, there is a lot of room for schedulers to fill in intermediate levels, but there had to be one intermediate level with deliverables only, and the lowest level should always be activities.
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Why Break a Program Down into Subprojects?
