Delivery Plan
The Delivery Plan is where strategy becomes operations: the engagement activities from your Canvas, organised into delivery phases, with the tasks required to run each one. It answers the question every team asks after planning — who does what, when?
From the project sidebar, go to Delivery (the second stop on the journey).
If you skip this: the canvas stays a poster. Activities happen ad hoc, nothing is dated, priority groups quietly drop off the plan, and three weeks before engagement opens someone builds a panic spreadsheet. The Delivery Plan exists so that spreadsheet never does.
The Delivery Plan at a glance
Top to bottom:
- Header pills — activities with tasks, general tasks, and tasks still needing dates
- Context strip — the objective, promise, priority groups, and milestones from your Canvas, with Open Canvas one click away. Delivery decisions should be made looking at the strategy, not from memory.
- Heads up — soft guidance (see below)
- Phases & milestones synced from Canvas — a read-only summary of your delivery structure, with Open Canvas to change it
- The phase rail — your delivery structure
- Other delivery work — tasks not tied to a specific activity
- Continue in Tasks — the handoff to day-to-day execution
The phase rail
Delivery work is organised into phases — Early Engagement, Active Consultation, Report Back — shown as a numbered rail. Each phase shows its derived date range and activity count, and the rail marks delivery state from your scheduled dates:
- Filled marker + “Happening now” — the phase whose dates span today
- Check marker — phases whose dates have passed
- Quiet numbered marker — phases ahead of you, or not yet dated
Phases with no dates show no state — CE Canvas derives state from real dates and never guesses. Milestones appear as anchors interleaved on the rail between phases, marking the key dates the schedule pivots on.
Some phases are administrative “Behind the scenes” work — internal planning and reporting that isn’t part of the public engagement approach. These are de-emphasised on the rail and hold tasks directly rather than activities.
Under each phase sit its activities — the engagement methods from your Canvas. Each activity card shows its phase (changeable inline), its task count, and its target groups. Two actions sit on the card, with the rest in a ⋯ overflow menu:
| Action | What it does |
|---|---|
| Suggest tasks | EVA proposes the operational tasks to run this activity — review, edit, and select before anything is created |
| Add task | Create a task on this activity directly |
| Edit details (⋯ menu) | Opens an operational details drawer — status, venue, facilitators, materials, accessibility, and delivery notes — the logistics that don’t belong in the strategic Canvas |
| Edit in Canvas (⋯ menu) | Activities are owned by the Canvas — edit the activity’s name and strategy there, so strategy and delivery never diverge |
Task rows under each activity show owner, dates, and status, and link straight into Tasks.
Suggesting tasks with EVA
Suggest tasks generates a reviewed list, not surprise work: each suggestion appears as a selectable row with a name, description, estimated hours, and priority. Expand a row to edit it, deselect what doesn’t apply, then create the selected tasks in one step.
Generated tasks are a strong starting checklist — venue logistics, materials, promotion, facilitation, follow-up — but they don’t know your council’s procurement rules or your venue’s lead times. Edit before creating.
Heads up — soft guidance
The Heads up line collapses the Delivery Plan’s guidance into one quiet row — expand it to see what could be tightened: activities without tasks, tasks without owners or dates, priority groups not yet covered by any activity, timing that doesn’t align with your milestones.
These are suggestions, never blockers. The plan keeps working while you sort them — but each one maps to a familiar failure mode, and the priority-group coverage hints in particular are the difference between “we planned to reach everyone” and “we checked”.
Phases, milestones, and general tasks
- Phases & milestones synced from Canvas — the Delivery Plan shows a read-only summary panel of your structure, not an editor. You add and rename phases in the Canvas (the Timeframe section) — Open Canvas from the panel goes straight there — so strategy and delivery stay one structure. What you can do here is firm up the dates: click the pencil (Edit phase dates) on a phase to edit its start and end inline. Milestones drive the milestone pulse on the dashboard and the timeline view in Tasks.
- Other delivery work — operational tasks that aren’t tied to a specific engagement activity (procurement, approvals, internal briefings) live in their own list at the bottom.
Communications projects
On a project classified as a Communications Project (inform mode), the phase-and-activity spine is replaced by a communication-methods panel — the Delivery Plan anchors work to your communication methods instead of engagement activities, and the guidance checks at-risk-group coverage rather than priority-group coverage. Same discipline, honest framing.
The handoff
The Delivery Plan ends where day-to-day work begins. A Continue in Tasks card closes the page with two buttons: Open Tasks takes the team to triage, assignment, and the board; Open Timeline jumps to the scheduled timeline and milestones. The Delivery Plan stays the structural view you return to when the question is “is the plan still sound?” rather than “what am I doing today?”
Next steps
- Tasks — execute and track the work
- Engagement Canvas — where activities are defined
- Engagement Playbooks — generate phases and tasks from a workflow template