WBS Report Template

Toolkits
Toolkits January 16, 2022

WBS Report Template

This WBS report template enables you to produce a detailed and thorough WBS report as part of the monitoring and management process for your project.

The work breakdown structure document is a critical document for your project and as such you will need to provide regular reports and communications to your project team, stakeholders and sponsors. These reports on how each work level and package is progressing in accordance with the project plan form a vital part of your project’s monitoring and management.

The WBS report plays a key role in communicating the progress of your project to all interested parties and keeping these individuals and groups aware of the status of each aspect of your project. In this report each aspect is defined as each work package that has been created as part of your decomposition process during your initial project planning. It has a deliverable orientation because it focuses on the actual ‘work levels or packages’ that need to be produced and executed so that your project is successful.

The WBS report may be the first communication stakeholders, sponsors or end users receive that informs them certain areas (work packages) of the project are falling behind schedule. It is important at this stage that you manage their expectations effectively so that you retain their support. In order for you to retain and nurture such peoples’ support your WBS report must give sufficient explanation of why a particular area or work package has fallen behind schedule or been completed earlier than expected.

Work Breakdown Structure Report Template
An essential part of this report is to follow this explanation up with the way in which the project team intends to bring delayed work packages back on track. These actions may also need to outline how the impact on following activities, as well as the inter-relationship with other deliverables, is being adjusted to reduce potential delays and keep the project to plan.

The template for your WBS report is an example of the type of report you need to detail in your work breakdown structure (WBS) document. It will enable you to provide the necessary parties with a detailed report of WBS progress according to the project plan. This report template contains the essential information that you would require, but it is easy for you to amend it to suit your specific project requirements.

The details your WBS report would contain are the unique id and descriptions for each WBS package. You also need to record which phase of your project the WBS relates to and its status. The latter records whether or not this particular aspect of work is progressing according to plan, ahead of schedule or falling behind. In such circumstances as the latter then you also need to provide an explanation as to why this work package is taking longer to complete than expected or planned and detail the proposed action that is being taken to resolve this situation so that the project completion date is not compromised in any way.

An essential supporting document to this report is the WBS (work breakdown structure) dictionary. Its purpose within a project is to ensure that confusion and misunderstandings are avoided. It achieves this by defining the exact scope of each work package and providing project definitions of any specialist term, industry jargon or acronyms that will be used throughout the project’s lifecycle.

Work Breakdown Structure Dictionary Template
It also provides a detailed description of each work packages acceptance and quality criteria so that all involved known how to define when an item of project work is complete.

Our free WBS dictionary template allows you to identify and define the complete requirements of your project, even down to the detail of each work package including its unique id, description, its level within the project and who ‘owns’ this package. The owner of a work package can be an individual or an organization.