The Significance of Work Packages in Project Scope Management

The Significance of Work Packages in Project Scope Management

If you're preparing for the Project Management Professional (PMP) credential test, you may know there's a lot to understand. Regarding project scope management, the work package concept is crucial to learn. Work packages are significant when preparing the WBS structure for any project.

What is Work Package?

A work package is a compact unit of a WBS structure. When preparing a WBS leveraging the decomposition method, deliverables usually are broken down into smaller, more manageable chunks of work.

This method of deconstruction continues until the deliverables are small to be considered work packages. Each of these should be compact to help the project professional calibrate the cost and duration. Work packages can be scheduled, cost estimated, monitored, and controlled.

What’s in a Work Package?

Every project management dataset has a set of smaller pieces linked with it called work packages.

• Budget - a must to account for how much was allotted to the work package.
• Deadlines - provides the project professional a reference point to estimate the work progress.
• Risks - identifying risks and formulating a risk management plan is a crucial step to avert the issues before they start. You also need to monitor progress to stop any potential issues prior to getting worse.
• Task Priority - by structuring your work according to the WBS, you set priorities for each task, informing teams of their activities.

Work Package Specifications

When a person completes a work package, they generally share a standard set of traits. For instance, these might include the type of work performed and whether that sort of work is done on programming, marketing, or other skills.

Undeniably, it would help to find what activities you will perform in this package, when they'll take place, and how much time they'll consume. Resources may also be relevant to achieving these tasks; some may be material or technological-based.

Every project must have a dedicated team leader and stakeholders that are deeply committed to that specific project. It's one's responsibility to get their contact information and keep them updated with the work progress.

Importance of Work Packages

By breaking down a project into work packages, the creation of WBS becomes seamless, and project professionals will have excellent control over tasks. 

Other benefits of why work packages are of utmost significance include:

• Work packages allow concurrent work on various project elements parallel by several teams. Each team follows the assignments defined for the package and completes them within a specified timeline.
• Once the teams are done with their packages, the whole project unites together with smooth collaboration. Completing these packages is overseen by a professional such as a supervisor, designated team member, manager, or team lead. 
• Even though costs are calibrated at an activity level, these cost estimates are clustered to the work package level, where they're estimated, managed, and controlled.
• For each package, we can find the direct labor costs, the direct material costs, equipment, contractual services, other non-personal material, and indirect costs.

Essential Tips for Work Packages

Some of the essential project management tips to assist with work packages are:

1. Don't ignore bringing your team into the process to make a WBS. Your team is the work frontier and your best resource when ensuring the project has enough time and budget to evaluate potential risks.
2. Two added advantages of a work package are that it offers a precise time and expense estimate while making it seamless to view which project portions are a more significant percentage of the whole.
3. It's recommended to assign a single person to tackle each job and report to the project professional, thus, ensuring accountability and efficient management of workloads. 
4. Every WBS package should be something only that package will generate and shouldn't repeat the package elsewhere. 
5. Limit your project, so it's accomplishable within a limited time, i.e., not more than two weeks at the most. You want to perform the campaign simultaneously with your reporting schedule.

Estimating Work Package Performance

a. With Earned Value Management

The Earned Value (EV) management measurement can estimate the work package performance. It merges project scope, schedule measures, and cost to help the project management team assess and evaluate project progress and performance. In addition, it calls for the prep of a collaborated baseline against which can calculate the work package performance for the project duration.

1. EV measurement develops and monitors three crucial dimensions for each package.
2. Planned Value - an authorized budget dedicated to the achievement of work for the package.
3. Earned Value - a value of work performed expressed in terms of the approved budget allotted to the package.
4. Actual Cost - total cost incurred and recorded in achieving work performed for a package.

b. With Other Metrics

1. Cost Variance (CV) - a measure of schedule project performance. It's the difference between earned value and actual costs, i.e., CV = EV – AC
2. Cost Performance Index (CPI) - a measure of work completed value compared to the project's actual cost, i.e., CPI = EV / AC
3. Schedule Variance (SV) - a measure of schedule project performance. It's defined as the difference between earned value and planned value, i.e., SV = EV – PV
4. Schedule Performance Index (SPI) - a measure of achieved progress relative to a project's planned progress, i.e., SPI - EV / PV

Work packages give teammates a perfect understanding of their responsibilities with organization charts and other aids. In addition, several formats exist to document teammate roles, most of which fall under three categories: hierarchical, text-based, and matrix-based.

For example, the responsibility assignment matrix (RAM0 is leveraged to display the relation between work packages and project team members. On massive projects, a higher-level RAM defines what a project unit or group is responsible for within each package. Moreover, a lower-level RAM is leveraged within the group to assign roles, authority, and responsibility for specific tasks.