Ways of structuring a project

Project management is not only about defining tasks and setting up their dependencies, it is also about organising the different parts of a project into a coordinated whole. Asta Powerproject lets you organise your project using:

Charts, to expand tasks into greater detail.
Summary tasks, to group related tasks together.
Hammocks, to overview unrelated tasks.
Resource and cost breakdown structures, to view the project breakdown exactly as you want.

You can also organise a single file as a portfolio of individual projects, by identifying that individual charts and summary groups are projects themselves.

In addition to structuring a project using a hierarchy of charts and summary tasks, you can set up a work breakdown structure to define and group a project's discrete work elements (ie its tasks) in a way that helps to organise and define the total work scope of the project. Each element within a work breakdown structure element may represent a product, data, a service, or any combination of the above. A WBS also provides a framework for detailed cost estimating and control.

A work breakdown structure is a tree structure, in which all of the elements on one level are summarised by elements on the level above. A WBS is useful when you want to break down the work involved in a project, starting from the main phases of the project and expanding right down to the individual tasks that must be carried out. Each element within a WBS is identified by an alphanumeric WBS code and a descriptive WBS name.