A transportation company is transforming its operations and main freight system. The scope statement is in place and stakeholders agreed to an iterative delivery approach. What should the project manager do next to help the team understand the work required?

The correct answer is to work with the team to decompose the scope into a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) and work packages. After the scope statement is in place, the next logical step in an iterative delivery approach (which often implies agile or hybrid methods) is to break down the high-level scope into manageable components. The WBS provides a hierarchical decomposition of the total scope of work to be carried out by the project team to accomplish the project objectives and create the required deliverables. This collaborative effort ensures the team understands the work and contributes to realistic planning. Creating a requirements management plan is important but typically precedes or runs concurrently with scope definition, not as the immediate next step after the scope statement is agreed upon. Beginning to develop the entire project management plan with detailed schedules and assignments is premature without first decomposing the scope into a WBS. Working directly with stakeholders to build the WBS and assign tasks, without involving the team, bypasses the critical step of team collaboration and ownership in defining the work.