Management System-Functional Work Breakdown Structure (FWBS)

Key Instrument for Integration of Project Management and Corporate Portfolio Management

It is a fundamental issue for the companies to define their mission, vision and values and then to work out in detail to specify all the activities they do to fulfill their mission and vision in a structured model. Without such information each stakeholder and each personnel of the company will have its own understanding of what exactly the company does. Such diversified opinion about the company’s activities is detrimental to its operation and causes lack of general understanding to ease the communication and flow of information within the company.

We in Raya started a campaign to eventually develop a list of company’s functions. This challenging effort of recognizing all activities which company does and formulating them precisely to serve various purposes and finally have the corporate FWBS established, as the first attempt to develop integrated project and corporate management system, took about two years and consumed lots of resources. Thanks to the continuous support of the company’s management and well-coordinated performance of the personnel we have now our FWBS consisting of:

• Five supporting, or what we call it nonoperational function categories;
• Fifteen operational function categories subdivided mainly to:

1.  Project management,
2.  Customer services, product development and marketing and sales,
3.  Core business function categories;

• Eight operational / nonoperational functions categories.

These functions have been cascaded, coded and described both in Farsi and English languages. These function categories which totally consists of about 5500 functions are also sub categorized based on the type of resources they need. Whereas insourced functions need manpower resources, the outsourced functions require various types of resources including manpower, material, machineries and sometimes combination of resources which we have named them services. Some specimen of these functions can be seen here.

This challenge and its outcome have immediately enabled us to:

1. Having the same understanding of what the company does to perform its operation and to meet its targets amongst the stakeholders including company’s personnel. A list of the function categories can be seen here.
2. Precisely structuring insourced and outsourced functions helping to appropriately develop the company’s organization chart. It is worth mentioning that insourced functions require operational type of organization whereas outsourced functions need supervisory control organization. A list of functions which are sub divided to insourced and outsourced function categories can be seen here.
3. Accurately attributing performance of functions to the company’s units and departments in accordance with the organization chart and developing jobs description. A specimen of job description developed based on FWBS can be reached here.
4. Establishing a common language to accurately communicate the corporate functions within the company.
5. Reporting the daily works which each company’s personnel does by giving address to the relevant functions in the FWBS. A specimen of such report is shown here.

Based on the general plan we have set for developing an integrated system for project and corporate management in the company, the FWBS would have an important role and would provide more other benefits and facilitation which will be presented in the future.