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Management and Economics OPEN ACCESS

Features Of Implementing a Work Breakdown Structure in Multidisciplinary Projects

Valentin George Cretu
Project Planning Manager at Totalenergies Paris, France
DOI Crossref DOI 10.37547/tajmei/Volume07Issue08-08
tajmei 2025
VOL. 7 / NO. 8 AUGUST
FULL TEXT PP. 106-114
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VOLUME 7
ISSUE 8
YEAR 2025
PAGES 106-114
RESEARCH OVERVIEW

Abstract

The article examines the implementation of a work breakdown structure in multidisciplinary projects and its role in ensuring consistency in planning, budgeting, and quality control. The relevance of the study is justified by the need to coordinate diverse engineering and scientific schools accustomed to their work‑structuring templates, which, without a common decomposition language, leads to package duplication, hidden interfaces, and risks of resource overrun. The objectives of the article are to analyze existing standards and practices, identify empirical patterns in how WBS quality influences project timeliness and budget compliance, and formulate methodological recommendations for harmonizing codes, terminology, and integration packages. The novelty of the research lies in the systematic comparative analysis of NASA guidelines and construction case studies, in the content analysis of buffer tasks according to the schedule margin methodology, and in the proposal of a classification of interface tasks along three axes (technical, contractual and organizational); the study demonstrates how to link the WBS‑dictionary with digital PDM, PLM and PPM platforms to enhance transparency and adaptability of project structures. The main conclusions show that a properly constructed WBS functions not only as a work map but also as a mechanism for translation between professional languages, ensures traceability of budget, schedule and requirements, and that integration and interface packages, defined as autonomous elements, transform hidden dependencies into manageable planning objects; the applied empirical threshold rules (8/80, 4%, 40 hours), the RACI role model and schedule margin buffer tasks create a dynamic yet predictable framework capable of adapting to evolving requirements. The article will be helpful to project managers, systems engineers, integration management specialists, and all those involved in planning and control of multidisciplinary projects.

RESEARCH TOPICS

Keywords

work breakdown structure WBS multidisciplinary projects hierarchical coding interface management RACI integration packages
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