WBS is a great tool to give a thought, especially that recently several people asked me about it. There are several aspects which might be considered...
Some people things that WBS is something totally detached from Scrum. I don't agree with this. First of all if we would show a product backlog and a sprint backlog as a structure, we could consider it to be WBS. The main difference would be related to the fact that WBS must cover 100% of the work effort what means, that we at least have some placeholders for the work which is unknown at the moment. Regarding similarities, PMI Book explains that WBS decomposition for a deliverable or a subproject that will be accomplished far into the future may not be possible. In that case the team waits until they have more knowledge (Rolling Wave Planning) - sounds like Scrum to me:).
Recently my colleague asked an interesting question. He said that he already has WBS for his project but he would like to start following Scrum, he asked what he can do with it? It depends on the WBS which he has, but most probably with small modifications, WBS items could be used as themes, stories and tasks. In addition Scrum doesn't say that you can't have a detailed plan in the beginning, it just says that it might not make sense to have one and that it might be misleading. WBS items could be helpful during Sprint Planning meetings or calculating an initial team velocity and an initial release schedule.
It is also important to remember that WBS is not meant only for PM, but it is also a communication tool, shows a customer why a project is estimated for a certain budget, verifies how well a customer defined the requirements, helps forecasting a risk, etc. In a project where a customer is against Scrum it could be used at some point, in the middle of the project to show how much effort was wasted creating it, since most probably, later on, the modified plan would be far from the original one.
Summarizing, I'm quite sure that in some cases I'll use WBS even in the Scrum projects. It is important to remember that we decide what WBS really contains and how detail it is.
Some people things that WBS is something totally detached from Scrum. I don't agree with this. First of all if we would show a product backlog and a sprint backlog as a structure, we could consider it to be WBS. The main difference would be related to the fact that WBS must cover 100% of the work effort what means, that we at least have some placeholders for the work which is unknown at the moment. Regarding similarities, PMI Book explains that WBS decomposition for a deliverable or a subproject that will be accomplished far into the future may not be possible. In that case the team waits until they have more knowledge (Rolling Wave Planning) - sounds like Scrum to me:).
Recently my colleague asked an interesting question. He said that he already has WBS for his project but he would like to start following Scrum, he asked what he can do with it? It depends on the WBS which he has, but most probably with small modifications, WBS items could be used as themes, stories and tasks. In addition Scrum doesn't say that you can't have a detailed plan in the beginning, it just says that it might not make sense to have one and that it might be misleading. WBS items could be helpful during Sprint Planning meetings or calculating an initial team velocity and an initial release schedule.
It is also important to remember that WBS is not meant only for PM, but it is also a communication tool, shows a customer why a project is estimated for a certain budget, verifies how well a customer defined the requirements, helps forecasting a risk, etc. In a project where a customer is against Scrum it could be used at some point, in the middle of the project to show how much effort was wasted creating it, since most probably, later on, the modified plan would be far from the original one.
Summarizing, I'm quite sure that in some cases I'll use WBS even in the Scrum projects. It is important to remember that we decide what WBS really contains and how detail it is.
