Planning activities - Breaking down work packages
Motivation
As I am diving more into the world of PM, I come across topics like Work Breakdown Structures (WBS) and scheduling techniques like critial-path scheduling. Some of these learnings are oriented by Bonnie Biafore 's PM Foundations Course [0] and her advanced dive into Project Scheduling [1].
I have always been a big fan of structuring my work properly, writing TODO-lists and seeing progress in form of milestones reached. Iraida Elisa likes to call me the "number guy", endorsing my affinity of metrics. This brings up the idea, that also for this VLOG project [2], we need some kind of metrics to track progress. Obviously, we have the high-level deliverable of the published videos, but it would also be interesting to track progress during the creation of a video, estimate work load and thus plan the process from recording, cutting and uploading, all the way to receiving millions of likes and new subscribers with every video (surely these numbers will be realistic within a couple of weeks).
Overview
The idea of a WBS is to explore activities needed to reach the projects high-level deliverables. As we have already established the high level deliverables (check out my first article of this series [3]), we now want to break these down into lower level deliverables to finally construct activities out of them.
First throw
WBS of deliverables
We have identified four (4) key deliverables:
In the end we will have 39 Videos on our Youtube channel. The target of a video is only met when it is uploaded and published. The next step was to break down these four high-level deliverables into lower- and lowest-level deliverables. An example can be found in figure 2.
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The final step is the accumulation of tasks that can be estimated and assigned to the previously defined roles (or maybe assigned to new roles, who knows). Also the defined tasks can be analysed for dependencies and put into a GANTT-diagram (but we will look at that in a later stage).
Derived activities
In figure 3 we can see the activities we derived from the WBS of deliverables.
Learnings
In a project of this scale (pretty small), over-engineering the project plan is an imminent risk. What use is the planning of activities, if they are not tracked properly? On the one hand, oftentimes when working on videos, we feel it would pose an unnecessary overhead of administrative work to track the tasks that are complete and pending. On the other hand, tracking activities might offer the possibility to increase the quality of the output significantly, for example by planning a proper timeframe to work on a script. Also already having some scenes in mind (from a previous process step) when filming on-site, should increase the quality of the scene compositions. Having a fixed set of activities also makes it easier to assert a certain kind of routine, which we often lack in our traveling day-to-day.
As we are used to work with Jira [4] (focused on software development in an agile project framework), we will try to set up a project containing the recurring activities and their superordinate lowest-level deliverables to organise the workload. We believe, even if the resulted activities are not tracked, organising everything already has a big benefit, because it gives a better overview of the workload that is connected to this seemingly simple project.
Another benefit we have noticed already is the critical analysis of the process. Taking more time researching activities has given us more insights into what steps might be necessary to increase quality or simplify the process. One part (for example) was recording some background noises with intent. We will play with that in a future video.