Customising Project Stages allows you to define the steps a submission goes through, from start to finish - see here for more information on Project Statuses. Here’s how you can edit the stages of a Project and link them to core statuses.
What is a Submission Stage
A submission Stage is part of the submission lifecycle from initial submission to it's eventual outcome. Let's say you receive submissions to be published in your Literary Magazine. You first accept new submissions - this is the first stage of the journey at which point a submission is either accepted or declined. If the submission is declined that may be the end of the lifecycle for that submission however if there is potential, it may need to go to a second reviewer - this might be the second stage of the journey. After that, there may need to be some further review or dialogue with the author themselves, that could be another stage. Finally the piece of work could be published and the author sent a payment - this could be the final stage. Visualising all these submissions in various points along the submission lifecycle in a Kanban board approach can be very useful for users and workflow management.
Steps to Edit Project Stages:
Go to Settings: Navigate to Organisation Settings and select Projects.
Select the correct Project whose and head to Stages
Assign Statuses to Stages:
For each stage, assign one of the four core statuses: New, In Progress, Rejected, or Completed.
The first stage will always be set with the New status.
The final stage will automatically be set with the Completed status.
Save Changes: After making your adjustments, save your changes to apply the updated workflow.
Important Notes:
Stages allow you to customise the steps a submission goes through, but statuses track the overall progress.
You can have multiple stages in between the first and last, which will be linked to either "In Progress" or "Rejected" statuses depending on your workflow needs.
You can customise Stages at a Project level allowing a high level of flexibility.
By configuring the stages and linking them to the appropriate statuses, you ensure that your submission process is organised, making it easy for both team members and submitters to track the progress from start to completion.