Breakdown Structures Revisited

Breakdown structures are central to the practice of project management and have their origins in the industrial revolution.  In the ‘Wealth of Nations’ Smith advocated breaking the production of goods into tiny tasks that can be undertaken by people following simple instructions. ‘Why hire a talented pin maker when ten factory workers using machines and working together can produce a thousand times more pins than the artisan working alone?’  Similar ideas underpinned Newtonian physics. Newton saw the world as a harmonious mechanism controlled by a universal law.