PM Excellence Academy
Module 5 of 12 · Part A · Planning Process
A contract delivers scope in paragraphs of legal prose, and a project manager cannot schedule that prose, staff it, or price it until those paragraphs become named tasks. That translation produces the Work Breakdown Structure, the foundation of every plan.
Illustrated module guide · the complete walkthrough · companion to the Quick ReferenceFinance showed you that effort can outrun earned value. Before you can plan, price, or protect a single hour of effort, what has to exist first?
The problem
When the contract is signed, the scope lives in paragraphs of legal prose: “The Architect shall prepare Design Development Documents to fix and describe the size and character of the Project…” That sentence is a promise, and a promise cannot be assigned to a person, estimated in hours, or priced against a fee. The first act of planning is to translate contract language into work the team can actually run.
That translation answers planning’s first three questions, in order, and those three questions are exactly this module:
A breakdown done right gives everything downstream, the schedule, the staffing, and the fee itself, something solid to stand on.
Part A answers What, Which role, and How much. Part B takes the breakdown built here and answers the last two questions, When (the schedule) and Who (staffing), using Logic-Based Planning.
?Pause & predict.
A PM reads the DD scope clause, agrees it is clear, and tells the team “let us get going on DD.” What did they skip, and what breaks three weeks later?
Module 5 ends at a committed plan. Planning Studio 1 puts you on a live phase: Design Development at Oakhaven, $280,000 of Grace fee, a real scope, and a real roster. You will draw the scope boundary, build the WBS, and staff the budget, and everything you commit carries into Part B, where the same plan becomes a schedule, an Earned Value Plan, and the S-curve. One plan, five artifacts, built by you. Open Planning Studio 1 →
Step 1 of 3 · What is the work?
A Work Breakdown Structure is a hierarchy. A project manager decomposes the project in four levels, each level more concrete than the last, until the work reaches tasks small enough to hand to one person and to check off.
A billing phase of the contract.e.g. Schematic Design · Design Development · Construction Documents
A physical thing the phase produces.e.g. Floor Plans · Building Elevations · Reflected Ceiling Plans · Roof Plan · Outline Specifications
A major component of a deliverable.e.g. Partition & room layout · Egress & code overlay · MEP coordination of the floor plan
An element assigned to a resource to complete.e.g. Draft partition types · Run egress capacity calc · Tag wall ratings · Coordinate column grid
The test for the bottom level is strict: a real task is one a project manager can name, hand to one role, estimate in hours, and know when it is done. “Floor plans” is a deliverable rather than a task, and “Draft dispatch-floor partition types and tag wall ratings” passes all four tests.
Step 1 of 3 · worked example
Consider a worked example, one real Design Development scope on the Oakhaven Public Safety Campus. The DD agreement contains a handful of scope statements, and a project manager takes each one and pulls it apart, level by level, until the decomposition reaches assignable tasks. Click a contractual scope statement to watch it decompose.
2026 Project Budgeting Spreadsheet: the phase tabs (SD, DD, CD…) are level 1, and the rows added inside each tab are the deliverables, work packages, and tasks. A clean WBS is what makes the spreadsheet a working budget.
?Pause & predict.
Two PMs decompose the same DD scope. One stops at “Floor Plans, 200 hours.” The other breaks Floor Plans into six work packages with tasks. Whose budget will leadership trust, and whose project can be tracked in week three?
You just watched the DD scope decompose. Now do it under pressure: the Studio deals you 19 candidate work packages for Oakhaven DD, of which 14 belong and 5 carry the scope of other phases (permit-set detailing, program re-validation, massing studies, bid addenda, submittal review). Every wrong “in” spends part of the $280,000 fee. Get the boundary clean and the Studio hands you the full structure, the same 9 deliverables, 14 work packages, and 40 tasks in the project’s filed WBS. Work Stage 1 →
Step 2 of 3 · Which roles?
With tasks in hand, a project manager decides which role each one belongs to, a role, not yet a named person. That is soft-resourcing. The rule is precise: the work shall go to the lowest skill level that can complete it competently and responsibly, and therefore at the lowest cost.
“Lowest” means the lowest competent level rather than the cheapest available body. A Principal redlining partition types burns margin for no added value, and a Design Intern sealing a code plan is malpractice rather than economy. The right level is the floor at which the work is still done right. A task placed below that floor fails on quality, and a task placed above it leaks margin.
Consider one DD task, draft the dispatch-floor plans & partition types, estimated at 40 hours. Soft-resource it to different roles and watch the cost:
Oakhaven’s DD roster is eight roles, from the Principal in Charge at $315/hr to Designers at $115. In the Studio the principle of this section appears in dollars: the same task assigned one level up can nearly triple its cost. The Studio watches your mix. Zero QC Peer Reviewer hours means the 3.9 peer review never happens. Project Manager effort under ~8% means the phase carries no management effort. Principal time over ~10% of cost raises a question about who should hold the work.
Step 3 of 3 · How much?
Budgeting a task is a short, repeatable chain that runs from the task to its cost. The task and the role are already established, so the next step is to estimate the hours, price them at the role rate, and arrive at the cost of the work. Repeat the chain for every task, roll the tasks up to a work package, the packages up to a deliverable, and the deliverables up to the phase, then hold the total against the fee.
The module’s Quick Reference is a live Budget Builder, seeded with this Oakhaven phase and priced on the 2026 Grace rate card. Change a role or move hours and watch the margin move.
The chain you just read runs live in Stage 2: $280,000 fee, 20% target profit, so $224,000 is all the labor you may buy. Enter hours per role and the dashboard prices every keystroke: cost, margin, and team loading. The floor is firm, and the Studio will not let you commit below 15% margin, because a phase that starts with the margin already spent has no room left to absorb anything. If the starting point is unclear, “Suggest a starting mix” seeds a defensible distribution built from PSMJ’s 10% project-management rule, 2 to 5% quality effort from cost-of-quality research, and AIA/Deltek staffing ratios, then compare your final answer against the plan Grace filed in BST. Work Stage 2 →
The close
Three questions, answered in order, turn contract language into a plan: What is the work (the WBS), which roles do it (soft-resource), and how much it costs (the budget). Without the breakdown there is nothing to schedule, nothing to staff, and nothing to defend.
A project manager cannot manage what has never been broken down.
With the work broken down, soft-resourced, and budgeted, the team finally holds the raw material for the rest of planning. Part B picks it up from here, sequencing the tasks into a schedule and resourcing the plan onto real people, using Logic-Based Planning for design.
Take one active project’s current phase. Pull one contractual scope clause and decompose it on paper: phase → deliverable → work package → three tasks you could hand to someone tomorrow. If a “task” fails the four-part test, break it down further.
?Challenge · from memory.
From memory: name the four levels of a WBS, and the four-part test for a real task.
Module 5 throughline
A project manager cannot manage what has never been broken down. The Work Breakdown Structure turns a promise into a plan the team can resource, price, and control.
When you commit the budget, Planning Studio 1 saves your plan and Part B picks it up whole: your WBS becomes the packages you sequence, and your hours become the labor demand your schedule has to honor. The foundation you build here is the foundation you will stand on next module. Build yours now →