Work Breakdown Structure
Every piece of scope in exactly one branch: the whole of a body's work, decomposed until the people who will do it can see their part.
Start from what must be true for the Milestone to hold, and name the features — every distinct thing that must exist, the explicit and the implicit. Group them by purpose, then by who carries them. Decompose each into deliverables, then into tasks, progressively, only as far as the people who will do them have walked. The test of a good breakdown is not its depth but its partition: each thing appears once, so nothing is counted twice and nothing falls between two branches.
It is load-bearing because it is the bridge between an aim and a plan that can be computed. A feature with no milestone is a question, not work. Decomposed scope becomes the rows of The activity table; undecomposed scope becomes a commitment nobody can size. At the largest scale the same instrument holds the whole: the first level of the breakdown of all the work required to reach the Goal is the twelve Pillars, and beneath them the trades and the regions in which each is practised.
It is kept alive rather than filed. Reviewed each season with the plan, it absorbs what was learned; left alone, it describes the work as it was imagined before anyone had done any of it. Decompose progressively, not exhaustively — a tree elaborated further than the walk has gone is a forecast wearing the clothes of a plan.
Also called: The work breakdown · WBS Stands on: The Meta Project · The Intent · Milestone Opens onto: Feature · Deliverable · Task · The activity table · Everything Is A Project · Plans and Specifications In play: table · beyond Sources: Work Breakdown Structure (wiki root page, an older general-practice treatment; its one LIØNSBERG-specific line names the twelve Pillars as the first level) · The LIØNSBERG Operating System (book, draft v0) §6 · The LIØNSBERG Lexicon (Work In Progress) §The Meta Project — lionsberg.wiki page name: Work Breakdown Structure Open: The root page is written in generic project-management language and reads as inherited rather than composed; the OS's §6 is the sharper articulation.