The New PM's Toolbelt

Craig is based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and has worked with ProjectManagement.com for the last six years developing the various HEADWAY processes (Project, Change and Portfolio). He has hosted a series of webinars and is a business intelligence subject matter expert.

  New Practitioners   Work Breakdown Structures (WBS)  

I have always found the multitude of project management concepts and tools to be pretty amazing. At your fingerstips you have access to a legion of resources to help you identify, define, understand and solve the vast array of issues that arise on your project. While world peace may be a bit of a stretch, some of the tools and techniques can, at least, start you down that path.

But where to begin? With so many options in front of you, where do you start? Much like the array of concepts and tools, the starting points are endless. In this article, I am going to boil it down to the basic three that I feel are the fundamental starting points in your path to project management mastery.

First, I am a strong believer that a project manager needs to focus on defining and communicating the scope of the project. The most fundamental tool in your toolbelt to define the scope is the work breakdown structure. The WBS is a hierarchical map of the work on a project and is focused not on the effort required to complete the project, but the deliverables of the project. It is critical to defining and understanding the scope on the project by breaking down the project into manageable deliverables.

The WBS is such a critical tool because it represents the entirety of the scope on the project. Combine this with its graphical nature, and it …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.