Project Administration - WBS Items

Managing the WBS (Work Breakdown Structure) Items for a project.

For an overview, see our short introductory video about WBS.

WBS stands for Work Breakdown Structure. These are the project work components that are usually defined in a project management system.

Clicking the Lists button and then the WBS Items menu item in Project Home 

brings up a page like the following (we’ve already defined a WBS for this project):

The actions available to us from this page are as follows:

• Display the Details of a WBS Item by clicking on the Details button
• Edit the parameters of a WBS Item by clicking on the Edit button (under Details)
• Delete a WBS Item from this project (under Details)
• Add a WBS Item to the project by clicking on the Create button
• Import a list of WBS Items from a CSV file. This CSV file would normally be exported from a project management system (like Microsoft Project).
• Export the WBS Items for the project

View WBS Item Details

Display the attributes of a WBS Item by clicking on the Details button. In the screenshot below we have displayed the details for the Phase 1 WBS item.

Edit WBS Item

You can edit a WBS Item by clicking on the Edit button, which brings up the page shown below. The Number and Name parameters of the item can be edited and the changes stored by clicking on the Save button.

Note that the Number can include both letters and numbers, and the system intelligently supports a hierarchical format (e.g. 1, 1.1, 1.1.1, etc). This means that it will sort WBS items properly, as well as supporting hierarchical filters on the iPad (e.g. 1.1 will include 1.1.1, 1.1.2, etc).

Delete WBS Item

Clicking the Delete button for a WBS Item simply raises an “Are you sure?” dialog and if OK is clicked the item will be deleted from this project (provided that it is not in use).

Create New WBS Item

Clicking the Create button brings up the screen shown below. Once the two mandatory fields Number and Name are entered clicking the Save button will add this item to the project.

Import WBS Items

A common way to populate the WBS Items list for a project is to import the list from a CSV file which would likely be created as an export from a project management system (like Microsoft Project for example). The screenshot below shows the import screen which is raised when the Import button is clicked.

Note that the imported list will append to/update the existing WBS Items list. As shown the update process is dependent on conditions being met as follows:

If an item with the number already exists, then it will be updated if the following conditions are met:
 - The name is different.
 - It has not yet been used in a memo.