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Roadmap ​

The roadmap is the answer to "what is engineering working on, and why". The tree is Objective → Initiative → Project: strategy at the top, the Initiative as the finance anchor in the middle, and individual projects — tied to the actual tickets in your PMS — underneath.

You are not building a roadmap from scratch. You are pointing the existing one at a strategy.

The Initiative is the finance anchor

This page is the roadmap view. For the finance model behind it — the Initiative/Project split, the inert gate, Finance Mode, the resolution chain — read Initiatives (finance anchor) and Initiative finance.

The layers ​

Objectives ​

Objectives are the "why" — the strategic outcome a group of Initiatives ladders up to — and their Key Results are the measure (a target, a direction, and progress). See Objectives + Key Results.

Initiatives ​

An Initiative is the human-created finance and governance anchor: it owns the cost centre, the Finance Mode, the budget, the committed FTE, and a portfolio lens (KTLO / Revenue / Cost-Reduction / Compliance). It groups the projects that deliver it. The list groups by status by default and shows project counts per Initiative; opening one drills into its child projects and its forecast-vs-actual variance.

Projects ​

Projects are the sync-only delivery children — the unit of allocation and effort, not of finance. Every project has a status (planning, active, completed, on_hold, cancelled), a PMS-derived delivery status, and an owner, is linked to teams via allocations and to PMS work items via the integration sync, and belongs to at most one Initiative.

A synced project is inert — carrying no cost-centre and not capitalisable — until a human assigns it a cost centre or adopts it into an Initiative. Finance resolves to the Initiative when the project belongs to one, else to the project's own cost centre.

See Projects for the full data model.

Drivers ​

Drivers remain available as project-level business tags (revenue, productivity, risk, compliance, KPI, KTLO), configured under Roadmap → Drivers. For the finance-sliceable classification, the portfolio lens at the Initiative grain is the successor — it sits on the layer that carries the money.

PMS-backed projects ​

If you have a PMS integration configured (ADO, Jira, Linear, Asana), the Roadmap → PMS view shows the source side of the picture: epics, features and stories pulled from the integration, ready to be promoted into Flowstate projects or linked to existing ones.

The link is two-way for read purposes. Flowstate stores the externalId of the source ticket; effort tracking pulls actual time off those tickets and rolls it up against the project. If a ticket has no Flowstate project link, it shows up in the orphan ticket review queue.

How the layers tie together ​

Objective (Pass SOC 2 Type II)
  ├─ Key Result (Open audit findings: 14 → 0, DECREASE)
  └─ Initiative (SOC 2 Type II)            ← financeMode, cost centre, lens=Compliance
       ├─ Project (Audit logging revamp)   ← synced, adopted
       │    ├─ Team allocation (Platform — 0.4 FTE)
       │    └─ Linked tickets (ADO #1234, #1289, #1301)
       └─ Project (SSO hardening)

Cost rolls up the same chain to the Initiative: a project's effort and actuals roll up to the Initiative that anchors it, and the Initiative's cost centre (or, for an un-adopted project, the project's own) is where the money lands. So the total spend on a portfolio lens like "Compliance" is the sum across Initiatives carrying that lens.

TIP

You do not need to model every layer at once. Start with Initiatives and the projects under them. Add Objectives once you want to tie Initiatives to a measurable outcome, and a portfolio lens once you want to slice the portfolio by KTLO vs revenue.

Editing in scenarios ​

Everything on the roadmap respects the live/plan split. Adding a project, changing a status, retagging drivers — all of it can happen inside a scenario without touching live data. Compare two scenarios to see the impact on driver coverage and project mix before merging.

Where to go next ​

Flowstate Documentation

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