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WBS and Project Schedule

Work Breakdown Schedule

As shown in the figure below, the Work breakdown schedule (WBS) defines the project.

As shown, everything undertaken in the project is displayed in a single and easily understandable

chart. It breaks down the project's most complex and crucial activities into small and manageable

segments. In the employee reward project, they will be five critical stages of the project, which

will enable the smooth running of the project, and in addition to that, there will be accountability

in each step (Zhu et al. 2020).

The project might look easy to execute but considering that the company will incur costs

and resources to undertake the project, it will be wise to make sure that every execution process

is brought to account to avoid mismanagement of funds. In summary, the below WBS describes

the deliverables needed for project completion, and this will enable the project team to be

focused and keen on what they need to achieve (Zhu et al. 2020).

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https://online.visualparadigm.com/w/vwxriyzo/diagrams/#diagram:workspace=vwxriyzo&proj=

0&id=1

Project Network Schedule

As shown in the schedule network diagram (SND) below, it further breaks down the

WBS structure by describing the project deliverables and, in addition, offers the timelines of the

project. This is simply giving a picture of the "What," "When," and "who" of the project and

shows the order of how the activities will be carried out and the logical relationships of the

activities (Tao & Dong, 2018).

In the below SND diagram, the critical path is the start to the project design and

recommendations stage to project team selection to project review and documentation and finally

completion, taking twelve days to ensure the project is complete. Identification of the critical

path is essential to the project team leaders as it will enable them to have an accurate estimate of

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the project's total duration. It will help identify task dependencies, resource gathering and

determine the project risks.

Also, in the identification of critical tasks that have no slack and ensure on-time

completion, monitoring of the project progress and measuring of the schedule variance, enable

use of schedule compression methods and measuring of the schedule variance and most

importantly, it will allow for the prioritization of tasks and create realistic project schedules. The

critical path in the below sequence is created using the critical path method to allow the project

manager to create a project schedule and estimate the total project duration (Adeyemi, 2021).

Some of the crucial components of the critical path that are important to identify are the earliest

start time (ES), the latest start time (LS), the earliest completion time (EF), the latest completion

time (LF), and the float.

The below SND diagram will be used in the project to discuss the sequences and

dependencies and the communication from the company; it is also the basis of identification of

critical paths, for instance, the chain of events that have the most extended duration. Overall, the

project comprises five stages: project start, project planning, project approval and team selection,

project review and documentation, and project end and follow-up. This handy visualization tool

will help speed up the project's activities (Tao & Dong, 2018).

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https://www.edrawmax.com/online/share.html?code=6e52042e739711eca5f10a54be41f961

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References

Adeyemi, B. (2021). Determining effective permeability at reservoir scale: Numerical

simulations and critical path analysis (Doctoral dissertation).

Tao, S., & Dong, Z. S. (2018). Multi-mode resource-constrained project scheduling problem

with alternative project structures. Computers & Industrial Engineering, 125, 333-347.

Zhu, M., Wang, S., Zhang, L., & Zhang, Y. (2020). Research on mobile cloud service model

based on WBS. In MATEC Web of Conferences (Vol. 309, p. 02013). EDP Sciences.