Process 13 of 40 — PMBOK 8

Develop Scope Structure

What Create WBS became in PMBOK 8 — and why user stories and the product backlog are now listed as outputs of the same process.

Performance Domain Scope Focus Area Planning

Develop Scope Structure is the process that turns a defined scope into something a team can plan against, assign, and track — by giving it a structure.

The process is no longer named after the WBS

This is Create WBS renamed, and it is the clearest single piece of evidence that the eighth edition means what it says about being agnostic to development approach.

The old process was named after an artifact. If you were not building a work breakdown structure, the process did not describe what you were doing, and you were left tailoring your way out of the standard. The new name describes the intent — impose a structure on the scope — and leaves the artifact open.

The output list is where to look

Outputs went from two to five. The scope baseline, the WBS, and the WBS dictionary are all still there. Listed next to them, in the same column, are user stories and the product backlog.

The guide states the equivalence directly: on agile projects the WBS corresponds to the product backlog, with work broken down into epics and stories. In this edition a backlog is not a lesser substitute for a WBS — it is an output of the same process, produced by a different approach to the same problem.

What still holds

Decomposition remains a listed technique, and the reasoning behind the 100% rule is untouched: whatever structure you build should account for all of the scope, and for nothing outside it. A backlog that omits work is broken in exactly the way a WBS that omits work is broken.

If you learned the previous set

Expect the phrase “Create WBS” to stop appearing. The harder adjustment is conceptual rather than terminological: the WBS has been demoted from the output of this process to an output of it.

ITTO at a glance

5 Inputs
3 Tools & techniques
5 Outputs

All three lists are formally open-ended — every ITTO column in the eighth edition ends in “Etc.”, so none of them is a closed set to be memorized. PMBOK® Guide — Eighth Edition, §2.2.2.4. What changed in the ITTOs, across all 40 processes.

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