The Work Breakdown Structure details the relationship in MAP between teh funding of a project and the work being performed.
The way a grant project and its tasks are funded may affect how you will find transactions listed in the Grants View module and reporting tools, so it will be helpful to know how the work breakdown structure for your project is structured. Each project must have at least one task associated with it, and must be funded by at least one award. However, although each project must have one task and award, a project can have more than one task (piece of work) and multiple awards (funding sources) associated with it. The same logic applies in the other direction, too...one award may fund multiple projects or tasks on different projects.
When you run reports or inquiries to search for budget or transaction information about grants, you will usually be asked to choose to search either by the Project or by the Award. You will get a different group of transactions (or different budget information) searching for each. For instance, if the project has two tasks, each with separate award funding, running a report by one of the award numbers will only show you half of the financial information for the Project (Task 1 but not Task 2), and might miss details that are important to you. Or, if you need to find specific details related to purchases for Task 2, you can narrow in on your desired result more quickly by searching for that award.
A very simple work breakdown structure would have a single research project with only one task (the primary research goal), which is funded by a single award.
Many research projects have more than one goal or task, which might be funded by different awards.
Some projects may have secondary tasks funded by a different source than the main award, such as when the university uses Cost Share funds to sponsor a task on multiple projects to track certain aspects of the project, like community interaction or budgeting for the hosting college.
Cost Share awards will begin with the letter 'C'.
Some large projects, or those that are planned to occur over a period of several years, may have separate awards for each task (sometimes each year of a project is designated as a task). If a multi-year project will receive funding in separate installments, each installment will have a separate award number. Note that the award number for each installment may be similar - same numerical sequence with a different alphabetical character to indicate the installment, e.g., 1001721AR, 1001721BR, 1001721CR...
Work Breakdown Structures can be quite varied, depending on many factors such as the number of stages or tasks involved in the research project, the number of sub-tasks required by the research or by the hosting College at WVU, and the number of awards or award disbursements funding the various tasks.
Some tasks have sub-tasks used for tracking more precise levels or schedules of research activity. Awards can be distributed such that they fund the whole project, or any of the associated tasks. Understanding the WBS of projects you are tracking will help you to determine what to search for when running reports or inquiry screens in MAP. 