Occam’s Razor for Work Breakdown Structure and Three-Dimensional Time Scheduling

This  article is about Deliverables-Activities – Time (DAT) charts—a new three-dimensional (3D) presentation of the classic instruments in project management: Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) and Gantt and PERT charts.

Classic WBS is represented by two-dimensional hierarchical structures or graphs. For Gantt chart establishment, the classic WBS has to have been previously converted to a one-dimensional list; for this reason, Gantt charts for big projects can be hundreds of pages long. For example, the Gantt chart for a modern, combined-cycle power plant construction project usually occupies up to 400 pages.

The length of the real Gantt or PERT chart makes it difficult to look at and it is also very difficult to follow the links between project tasks placed on the different pages or parts of a large Gantt chart. Gantt chart actualization also becomes difficult. In practice, these problems waste time during the initial setup and subsequent updates to the charts and lead to more bugs in the system.

The development of DAT charts is carried out in order to create time-scheduling instruments that will be free from the above-mentioned shortcomings.

DAT Time Scheduling

This paper proposes using a WBS in a two-dimensional format: the Deliverables – Activities (DA) chart. This structure was born as the matrix multiplication of two…