In project management

Project management

Project management is the discipline of planning, organizing, securing, and managing resources to achieve specific goals. A project is a temporary endeavor with a defined beginning and end , undertaken to meet unique goals and objectives, typically to bring about beneficial change or added value...

, a product breakdown structure (PBS) is a tool for analysing, documenting and communicating the outcomes of a project, and forms part of the product based planning

Product based planning

Product based planning is a fundamental part of the PRINCE2 approach to project management, and is a method of identifying all of the products that make up or contribute to delivering the objectives of the project, and the associated work required to deliver them.- Overview :Product breakdown...

 technique.
The PBS provides an exhaustive, hierarchical tree structure

Tree structure

A tree structure is a way of representing the hierarchical nature of a structure in a graphical form. It is named a "tree structure" because the classic representation resembles a tree, even though the chart is generally upside down compared to an actual tree, with the "root" at the top and the...

 of deliverable

Deliverable

Deliverable is a term used in project management to describe a tangible or intangible object produced as a result of the project that is intended to be delivered to a customer . A deliverable could be a report, a document, a server upgrade or any other building block of an overall project.A...

s (physical, functional or conceptual) that make up the project, arranged in whole-part relationship.
This diagrammatic representation of project outputs provides a clear and unambiguous statement of what the project is to deliver.
The PBS is identical in format to the work breakdown structure

Work breakdown structure

A work breakdown structure , in project management and systems engineering, is a deliverable oriented decomposition of a project into smaller components. It defines and groups a project's discrete work elements in a way that helps organize and define the total work scope of the project.A work...

 (WBS), but includes only the physical architecture of a product.