A Work Package Nobody Owned
A 9-month office relocation project has a work breakdown structure with four levels. During week 3, the PM reviews the WBS dictionary and notices that 'decommission legacy server room' appears as a level-3 element but has no named owner and no cost account. The facilities lead assumed IT owned it; IT assumed facilities owned it. The element has three sub-tasks, one of which (disposal of regulated hardware) requires a certified vendor with a 6-week lead time. The move date is fixed by a lease expiry. Separately, a level-2 branch called 'Stakeholder communications' contains a single work package worth 2% of budget but has consumed two status meetings already.
1. What does the unowned work package tell you about the quality of the WBS, and what should be done now?
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An element with no owner and no cost account is a WBS defect: the 100% rule and the assignment of every work package to exactly one accountable owner have been violated. Unowned work is the classic source of late-discovered scope. The PM should assign a single accountable owner (not shared), create a cost account, and confirm the three sub-tasks are fully defined. The regulated-hardware disposal is time-critical: a 6-week vendor lead against a fixed lease date means it must be started immediately and flagged on the critical path. The PM should also check whether other level-3 elements have the same gap rather than fixing only the one that surfaced.
2. What does the 'Stakeholder communications' branch suggest, and how should the PM respond?
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A level-2 branch with a single tiny work package that keeps generating meetings suggests the WBS is not decomposed to a manageable level - the branch is too coarse to estimate or control, so it absorbs attention disproportionate to its value. The PM should either decompose it into concrete deliverables (e.g., a comms plan, a resident notice, a staff briefing pack) each with effort and an owner, or fold it into an appropriate parent if it is genuinely trivial. The point is that WBS granularity should follow the 8-80 rule or similar: not so coarse that it cannot be tracked, not so fine that it creates administrative overhead.