Marketing and the WBS

Marketing professionals want to generate proposals that leverage data from past projects, such as project descriptions and the credentials of people who worked on the account or project. Your WBS should support these needs.

Marketing professionals need to be able to:

• Use existing project data stored for project management or accounting purposes. In this scenario, the marketing professional must work with an established work breakdown structure that contains more detail than he or she needs. The marketers must be able to extract the needed data from the existing structure.
• Create new promotional projects for use by marketing only. They can accomplish this by doing the following:
  • Create a one-level work breakdown structure for every project, or every marketable piece of work.
  • Break a large project down into smaller components (or phases and tasks), creating multiple levels of work breakdown structure. Then market the work done on separate components while still maintaining the relationship of the components. For example, if your firm built the entire John Hancock Center, but you want to market the gift shop inside as a separate project, you can create a work breakdown structure that allows you to save the entire project as the John Hancock Center, and save one of the components (or phases) as the gift shop.

Marketing Requirements

Your marketing staff has the following requirements of a WBS:

• Summarized data that highlights the most successful and most attractive aspects of past projects, including descriptions and lists of experienced personnel who worked on projects.
• Easy creation of proposals from stored data.
• For projects that both accounting and marketing use, marketing must be able to easily retrieve and report on information at a detail or summary level of the WBS.

Your marketing staff does not want the following:

• The level of detail required by project management and accounting.
• The constraints of a complex or detailed work breakdown structure that requires a high learning curve and time-consuming data entry.