Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) refers to a portion of a total project management plan that is used by the project management team to organize a project into manageable parts.

In other words WBS can be called as the Master Deliverable List (MDL). A deliverable could be a report, a document, a drawing, a server upgrade or any other building block of an overall project. A deliverable sometimes consists of multiple smaller deliverables. Each deliverable will have its scheduled dates (start date and finish date) and its details like resources, discipline, packages, description etc. 

You can use a WBS to manage deliverables in the following ways:

• Define and publish deliverables for the project
• Monitor the status and progress of deliverables for a project
• Monitor the deliverables based on planned dates

A Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is an integral part of project management where a task list is created by breaking the main task to smaller and manageable sub-tasks.  A task is an assigned piece of work often to be finished within a certain time. The tasks are arranged into a hierarchal structure. Each of these smaller tasks are planned, scheduled and monitored separately which reduces the difficulties in monitoring a large summary task.

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