The lifecycle, on one page

Work in Crosdesk moves along one path. Not every piece of work travels the whole way — a customer complaint goes straight to a board and out again — but the path is the same shape every time.

  Departments and people          who can see and do what
            │
            ▼
  Project  ──►  Canvas  ──►  Verify           what the work is, in what order, by when
            │
            ▼
  Tasks  (optionally under an Epic)           the unit of work
            │
            ▼
  Backlog  ──►  Sprint  ──►  Board            the commitment, and doing it
            │                   │
            │                   └──  Unplanned work      what arrived mid-sprint
            ▼
  End sprint                                  snapshot: spillover, absorbed ad-hoc work
            │
            ▼
  Release                                     what actually went out
            │
            ▼
  Reports                                     what it tells you afterwards

Features run alongside this rather than inside it: a feature is long-lived work that goes through phases and approvals, and it produces tasks that join the path above at the backlog. A phase has its own small plan — a start date and an estimate per step — so it can report where it actually got to against where it meant to be.

Documents sit beside the path too: specs and notes, filed in a department's folder, written as a draft and saved as numbered versions. A released version can be linked to any of the work above — a task, an issue, a project, a feature, a phase, a stage or a release — and the link always opens the current release. See Documents.

The short version

1. An administrator sets up departments and people. Departments decide visibility; groups decide capability. Both must allow an action.
2. Someone with project management shapes a project on its canvas — cards for tasks, edges for "this follows that" — estimates each card in working days, and presses Verify. Crosdesk computes the dates around weekends and holidays. The board becomes verified.
3. Tasks exist. They can be created on a canvas, from the Tasks page, from a feature step, or from an issue found during QA.
4. A sprint is planned from the backlog. Someone with sprint management creates the sprint and moves work into it.
5. The team works the board. Five columns: To do, In progress, Blocked, On hold, Done.
6. Work that arrives mid-sprint goes to Unplanned work — beside the commitment, not inside it.
7. The sprint ends. Crosdesk snapshots what was committed and what was delivered, carries unfinished work forward, and converts the unplanned work to planned.
8. A release is assembled from finished tasks, finished projects and finished feature phases, then shipped. After that it is frozen.
9. Reports answer afterwards — and are careful to separate what you committed to from what actually happened.

The five statuses

Every task is in exactly one of these, everywhere in Crosdesk:

Status	Meaning
To do	Not started.
In progress	Somebody is working on it now.
Blocked	Something else must finish first. On a verified board this is set by the plan, not by hand.
On hold	Stopped for a reason outside the plan — waiting on a supplier, a decision, a budget.
Done	Finished.

The difference between Blocked and On hold matters: Blocked means the plan is waiting, and Crosdesk works it out for you. On hold means a person decided to stop, and only a person can decide to start again.