Comments on: Work Breakdown Structure Examples

By: Angel Agueda

Angel Agueda — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 03:49:00 +0000

Hi Alan,
PBS and WBS are uses for the same thing with a very big difference that Josh remove in his book “Your WBS coach”, include the time variable in the representation. There are another little differences but are not very important.
I prefer talk and use PBS because Product describe better than Work the goal of this technique.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 07:05:00 +0000

I have switched from FreeMind to it’s more active fork, FreePlane (http://freeplane.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page). I highly recommend making the change

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 18:38:00 +0000

MLG, you can do a search and find examples, but I think many of them point you in the wrong direction. Here is a graphic of the structure taken from WBS Coach.

By: MLG

MLG — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 21:38:00 +0000

Do you have a sample of a 3 levels WBS that you can share?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 20:21:00 +0000

Thanks for the comment Alan! It sounds like you and I do very similar things, just in a different way. For me the WBS is only deliverables-based and so I don’t see a need for a PBS…my WBS is a PBS. From there, I use a Basis of Estimates (BOE) to list tasks needed for a deliverable and at the same time establish dependencies, estimates, and rationale/justifications and assumptions related to the tasks.

I think the means may be somewhat cultural in nature and definitely industry specific too. Do you happen to be from the UK or an area where PRINCE2 is prevalent Alan?

Thanks!

By: Alan T

Alan T — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 19:16:00 +0000

Surely WBS is *exactly* functional, a PBS (Product Breakdown Structure) is product-ised. My approach is to break down the end game via PBS and then break it further using WBS to include all the pernickety *doing* stuff – review, schedule, check, etc.