Follow a project from enquiry to handover

Each phase is a band across the canvas, and the same five names group the boxes in the rail. The band is not stored geometry — it is drawn around wherever its boxes happen to sit, so moving a box moves the band with it.

Five green milestone boxes sit on the route. Four of them are the payments, and each is released by a specific event rather than by a date.

The Project type? decision is the only fork between the two, and it sits in the Installation band. Everything before it is identical.

This map is a workflow, not a mind map, so the shape of a box tells you what kind of step it is. Six kinds appear on it.

Inside a box, the grey line under the title is the accountable role and the small bulleted list is what the step produces. A book icon in the corner means an article is attached; seventeen of the sixty-one boxes have one, and clicking any of the others does nothing on purpose.

The lines carry the meaning the legend describes, and on this map the legend is right: a solid line is the hand-off, work moving from one owner to the next, and a dashed line is a notification — somebody is told, but nobody waits. Fifty-six of the sixty-nine links are solid and thirteen are dashed. Several links also carry a word: Yes, No, Approved, Rejects, Approves, Reprice, Rework, Notes.

Every hexagon is a place where the project can go two ways, and the second way costs money or time. These are the boxes worth reading twice.

Four solid links carry more risk than the rest of the map put together, and all four fail the same way — somebody works from a document that has been superseded.

You are looking for a phase and cannot see it. The canvas opens at the first phase and the five bands run downwards. Scroll, or type the box name into Find a box — department, owner, output… at the top and let it centre the canvas for you.

An arrow seems to send work to the wrong place. Check whether it is dashed. A dashed line on this map notifies somebody; it does not move the work.

A box will not open. Only seventeen of the boxes have an article behind them. The rest are steps the manual has not written up, and the click is inert rather than opening an empty page.

The map and this article disagree about a step. The map is data and can be edited here; this article describes the standard route. Where your company genuinely works differently, edit the map rather than arguing with it, and say so in the article the box points at.

The bands are hard to see. They are drawn faintly on purpose, as dashed rounded outlines with the phase name in the corner, so they sit under the boxes rather than competing with them. The rail's grouping is the easier way to tell which phase a box belongs to.