Cost & Pricing

What is WBS?

Work Breakdown Structure

A WBS decomposes a project into a hierarchy of deliverable-oriented elements, giving every piece of work a place to plan, schedule, and charge cost. It is the backbone that ties scope, schedule, and budget together so performance can be measured at each element.

A WBS underpins the proposal's basis of estimate and the execution schedule, and it's how earned value (if required) is tracked.

In FORGEFORGE's execution-plan generator produces a WBS and schedule from the parsed requirements.

Common questions

What is the difference between a WBS and a schedule?

The WBS organizes the work into elements (the 'what'); the schedule sequences those elements over time (the 'when'). The schedule is built on top of the WBS.

Related terms