Work Breakdown Templates
These spreadsheets describe a general work breakdown for tackling projects. Make a copy of the Work Breakdown Template to create and modify. This is your own Work Breakdown Document.
Once you duplicate/print the document, fill in the spaces or add more rows to make the work breakdown reflect your project goals! I only make one request: If you create a new task, put a “9” in the thousands place of your task number. This will prevent task numbers from becoming ambiguous between your custom tasks and other discussions of the original task breakdown online.
Documents initially have the following columns:
| Column | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Task Number | Useful for reference between team members and for online reference. I do my best to avoid changing task numbers between versions, but some versions in the future could “skip” task numbers to avoid two tasks being described online with the same number. Projects marked UNSTABLE are works-in-progress and may have their task numbers changed several times before the project is considered stable. |
| Done | Tracks progress and task completion. |
| Task | Gives a brief description. Tasks named “EPIC” represent a chunk of related work. |
| Estimate | The numbers do not have meaning by themselves, only serve to convey the relative complexity of different tasks. This is NOT an estimate of days, weeks, or any other measurable unit – it is only useful for comparing the complexity of tasks. Epics have no estimate – their complexity is the sum of their parts. |
| Hurdles / Dependencies | A brief description of pain points I anticipate in the work. Epics instead identify other epics that need to be completed before this epic can be started – this can give an impression of what work can be done in parallel if a team would like to do some delegation of responsibilities. |
| Date Completed | When was this task marked as done? Marking this can help you create a burndown chart at the end of your project to demonstrate project management. |
| Work-Hours | Roughly how long did it take to work on this task? This can help you gain a sense of how long other tasks will take, factoring in their estimated complexity. |
Hanging Plotter (UNSTABLE)
This is the first work breakdown I have made, and I have not completed this project alongside the work breakdown document yet – there could be some missing tasks. This should still give a starting point though!
This project is not yet considered stable – task numbers may change significantly before first “stable” version.