What is a Product Breakdown Structure
A product breakdown structure or PBS is an hierarchical diagram representing the scope of an entire project deliverable. A PBS is a useful model for managing the scope of a project.
Benefits of a Product Breakdown Structure
A PBS helps you organise and visualise your user stories as deliverables to satisfy a capability that is needed to achieve a quantified business outcome.
It helps you to:
- Ensure completeness of a set of requirements
- Ensure traceability from user requirement through to business outcome
- Communicate scope effectively
- Work at different levels of granularity
- Monitor the size and status of groups of requirements.
- Determine the functional size of all the requirements needed to achieve a business outcome.
ScopeMaster’s Interactive PBS / Story Map allows for rapid Visual Organisation of Software Scope
The ScopeMaster PBS diagram allows you to work interactively with the organisation of your user stories. It is ideal for Product Owners or Business Analysts.
The PBS diagram is part of the ScopeMaster® Value Tracer feature that is designed to help you improve the traceability of each requirement (or user story) to the satisfaction of a business objective.
From within the PBS diagram you can now:
- Drag and drop stories into Epics
- Expand or collapse all to view the project at different levels of detail.
- Zoom into any given requirement.
- Track the functional size of an Epic/Capability
- Track the functional size (and implied cost) of delivering an entire business outcome
- Zoom in/out
- Add a new user story
- Add a new capability / Epic
- Add a new Outcome
Story Mapping
The Story Map is very similar to a Product Breakdown Structure. Similarly the process of story mapping is very similar to the evolution of a product breakdown structure.
Work at different levels of granularity:
High level:
Zoom in to see the detail:
