glossary — plain english
Work breakdown structure
Usually abbreviated: WBS
A breakdown of a project's work into smaller parts, used to check its scope and identify work that can be estimated and assigned.
Break the project into smaller pieces until each can be assigned and estimated. That gives you work to turn into scheduled tasks with a duration. A formal WBS is a numbered tree (1.0, 1.1, 1.2…) maintained as a document, often with a dictionary describing its elements.
Reviewing the breakdown helps you find missing work before scheduling it. Tasks such as migrating DNS or writing release notes are easy to omit when the plan only names the main build phases. Walk through each part with the people responsible for it.
For a small project, start with a plain-English outline and expand the parts that are too large to estimate or assign. Stop when the detail is sufficient for planning. Our guide shows how to build a work breakdown structure, step by step.
See it on a real chart
Describe your project in plain English and ganttchart.ai turns it into a Gantt chart you can edit and share. Or read the method first: the plain-English planning guide.