Sunday, November 1, 2009

Quick Tip for WBS

There are many people that want to know how to get started doing a Work Breakdown Structure.  Some people have never done one and don't want the first one to be at their company.  I have two quick tips to assist:

1)  Practice with a charity or a church.  These organizations desperately look for volunteers and especially volunteers who can help organize and run events.  This will give you an awesome opportunity to practice!  Call the United Way and introduce yourself.  There will always be an opportunity to help your community!

2)  Here is a quick way to get started.  Send out the scope to the team prior to the meeting and ask them to send back an Excel spreadsheet of the initial tasks that they can think of.  From there, do a mail merge onto address labels and put those on sticky notes.  Before the first meeting, go ahead and put the sticky notes on the wall.  When the attendees come into the meeting, have them start putting the tasks in order before the even sit down.  This will cut down the awkward silence that generally starts these types of meetings.  In very short order, you will have a great network diagram to use for your project.

Of course, you could always use a technology like Nxt Note as well.  Very, very cool technology!  Check it out!

1 comment:

Don Larson said...

MS Project 2007 includes an Excel template to facilitate importing tasks into MS Project 2007.

Don