Why a map

That context turns the map into a small model of the business that you can play with, test, improve and decide from, and that can make the load on your people visible. It is built around how people actually think, act and choose: we can hold only so much at once, so the map helps you simplify without losing the thread. It does not tell you what to do. The decisions stay yours.

More than a drawing

Any tool can draw a box and an arrow. The difference is what the box knows.

On a blank canvas, a box is a rectangle with a label. In Ursa Major, a box can be a piece of work with a stated duration, a stated wait, a cost, people and machines assigned to it, and, where you want one, an objective: a figure you are aiming for, shown next to the figure you planned. Lines show how work moves from one box to the next. Because the boxes carry figures, the whole map can be read in two ways: as a picture, and as a model.

As a model, the map lets you:

• Play. Change one assumption and see what moves. What if finishing took three hours instead of four? What if two steps ran side by side instead of one after the other?
• Test. Put an alternative on its own canvas and compare it with the current one before anyone is asked to change how they work.
• Improve. See where time is spent and where work waits, then choose what to look at first.
• Ease the burden on people. Set planned hours beside the hours a person has available. Where the plan exceeds the availability, the figure appears. It is a number to talk about, never a grade, and it is meant to start the conversation early, before a heavy week becomes the normal one.
• Choose better. Lay the options and their figures side by side, so the choice is made on something visible.

Each of these depends on context. A diagram with no hours, no waits and no objectives can be admired, but it cannot be tested. A map with them can.

None of this makes the map a judge. It shows what you have described. What it means, and what to do about it, is for you and your team.

How people think, act and choose

The map is designed around a few well-established facts about people.

We can attend to only a few things at once. A business has far more going on than anyone can keep in view. So we use shortcuts: habits, rules of thumb, whatever happens to be recent or vivid. The shortcuts work well most of the time. They fail when the thing that matters is not in view, such as a step nobody has looked at lately, or work waiting in a queue.

We describe the same work differently. Each person describes the part they touch, in their own words. The descriptions match at most steps and drift apart at handoffs, the places where work passes from one person to the next.

We tend to underestimate how long things take and how much waiting adds up. Work that takes an hour of effort often takes days to finish, because it waits for a person, a delivery or an answer. That wait is easy to forget, because nobody is working during it.

We choose more clearly when options sit side by side. Comparing two written figures is easier than comparing two memories.

So the map does three things on purpose. It puts the work in one shared place, so descriptions can be compared. It gives waiting its own figure, so it is not forgotten. And it keeps the options visible together.

Too much to capture at once

There will always be more going on than you can map. The answer is not to capture everything. It is to simplify.

A block can be broad: a name and a sentence is valid. When you need more, you open that block into a child canvas of its own, and the top-level picture stays readable. You decide how much detail each part of the business deserves. A rough map you can read beats a complete one nobody opens. Part 4 looks at this in detail.

Work time, waiting time, and how they relate

Time is where the shortcuts hurt most, so the map keeps its parts separate.

• Working time is the hours people spend on the work. It adds up across steps, whether steps run one after another or at the same time.
• Duration is how long a step takes from start to finish.
• Delay is time that passes with no one working: waiting for a delivery, a reply, a part, a decision.

A step can take one hour of work and four days of elapsed time, because most of it is waiting. The waiting does not cost working hours, but it still delays everything after it. When several steps are queued behind the same person, you might read the delay and that person's busy week as two views of the same situation. That reading is yours to make; the map shows both figures side by side.

Working time adds up across everything. Elapsed time follows the longest path through the work. Part 11 explains how; Part 5 shows how waiting and capacity relate.

A worked example: Northline Fabrication

Northline Fabrication is an invented business, used for illustration only.

Northline makes custom steel gates and brackets. Marta owns it and writes the quotes. Sam welds. Luc finishes: grinding, priming, painting.

A customer orders a gate. Marta's quote says the gate will be "finished". To Marta, that means ground and primed, ready for the customer to paint. Sam, who welds it, assumes the same. Luc has a different habit: when a quote says "finished", he takes it to mean painted in the customer's colour. He paints the gate. It looks good, and it takes about three hours more than the quote allowed for.

Nobody did anything wrong. Each person used a word the way they always use it. The word simply meant something different at each step, and the quote and the finishing bay had never been put side by side.

Suppose Marta, Sam and Luc spend an afternoon drawing the work instead. They draw the main steps: quote, cut, weld, finish, ship. Under each box, the person who does that step writes a sentence in their own words. Marta writes "quote: price, lead time, finish as agreed". Luc writes "finish: grind, prime, paint if the customer gave a colour". Next to each they write roughly how many hours it takes: finishing is 4 hours for grind and prime, and about 3 more for paint.

Nothing in the drawing tells Marta what to decide. But the two sentences now sit one step apart, and the difference is easy to see. She might read it as a wording problem in her quote, or as a step that is missing from the page: "ask the customer whether they want paint". Luc can say "paint is a separate job for us, closer to three hours". Sam can say what he hands over to Luc, and in what state.

The map did not make a decision. It made the mismatch visible before the next order, instead of after it.