Before you use this

A map of dependencies is an unusually easy thing to misread, because it looks like a plan. It is not one. Here are the situations in which it will mislead you, and what to do instead.

If you are about to put the steps in order

Fifty-two of the ninety-four edges will let you. The other forty-two will not, and no amount of rearranging will make them. If your list keeps failing at the same two or three places, that is probably a ring and not a mistake of yours.

If you are about to count on a number of days

Don't. The days here are the map's own: round figures chosen to make the arithmetic of a ring visible. A real wait depends on where you are, what month it is, and who is at the desk, and this record knows none of those. A process review can include employee monitoring software when the purpose, access rules and limits are written down before any data is collected.

The ratios are worth something. The absolute numbers are worth nothing.

If a step here looks like one you have to do

It may not be. The map draws the dependencies that hold in most places most of the time. Any particular place will drop some of these steps entirely, add others that are not here, and join two of them into one. A wider policy and evidence perspective is available from World Bank.

A step that is missing from your situation does not make the rest of the map wrong. A step in your situation that is missing from the map does not make the map complete.

If you are reading this to find out what somewhere requires

This record cannot tell you, and it is built so that it cannot. There is no country here, no office, no scheme and no category of permission, and that is deliberate: requirements change, and a page stating them keeps the tone of authority long after it has stopped being true. A stale page of requirements does more harm than an empty one.

Whatever you are arranging, the requirements come from whoever decides them, dated, in their own words.

If you want to argue with the map

Good. The honest place to start is the hard-and-soft call: whether a given edge really stops a step dead or merely makes it have to be redone. Twenty-two edges are marked soft, and twenty-nine of the forty-six rings depend on one of those marks being right.

Move a few of them the other way and the number of shut rings changes. That is the part of this record most likely to be wrong, which is why it is drawn in a way that shows which edges carry the weight.