Project Stage and Project Status in Deep Space

Two fields sit side by side in Project Settings and get confused with each other constantly. One of them decides which dashboards a customer can open — which is why almost every "my dashboards are missing" ticket is really a stage question.

For Customer Success and Implementation · Screenshots from the Holodeck workspace, 25 September 2026

1Stage and Status: two fields, two questions

Every project in Deep Space carries two independent fields. They live next to each other on the same settings page, they both look like a lifecycle, and they are not the same thing at all.

The Project Stage and Project Status dropdowns side by side in Project Settings, General tab — **Project Settings → General:** the **Project Stage** dropdown (showing Delivery (CON)) and the **Project Status** dropdown (showing Active) sit side by side. The helper text under each one tells you the difference — Stage is saved with the rest of the page, while Active and On Hold commit immediately and Archived asks for confirmation.

Field	The question it answers	Values
Project Stage	How far has this job progressed?	Opportunity (OPP) · Tender (BID) · Delivery (CON) · DLP
Project Status	Is anyone working on it at all?	Active · On Hold · Archived

They are genuinely independent, and every combination is legitimate. A project can be Delivery + On Hold — started on site, then paused. It can be Opportunity + Archived — pursued, then shelved. Winning a job moves the Stage and never touches the Status; archiving a project changes the Status and deliberately leaves the Stage exactly where it was, so restoring it puts the customer back where they were.

The one rule that resolves most tickets

Stage gates the dashboards. Status does not. If a customer cannot open a dashboard, look at Stage. If a project has vanished from their list, look at Status.

Losing a job is a Status question, not a Stage one. When a tender is lost the project keeps whatever Stage it had reached — nothing in the platform ever walks a project backwards. If the customer wants it out of their active list, they archive it.

2What each stage unlocks

The stage is not a label. It controls the dashboard menu on each project card on the Home tab. A project sitting at Opportunity shows three dashboards greyed out behind a padlock:

A Home project card at Opportunity stage with Commercial, Delivery and HSEQ dashboards greyed out and padlocked — **Home project card at Opportunity (OPP) stage:** the Commercial dashboard, Delivery dashboard and HSEQ dashboard are greyed out with a padlock icon, while Project settings stays open with its usual arrow.

The full gate, stage by stage:

Stage	Commercial	Delivery	HSEQ	Project settings
Opportunity (OPP)	locked	locked	locked	open
Tender (BID)	open	locked	locked	open
Delivery (CON)	open	open	open	open
DLP	open	locked	open	open

So "I can't see the Commercial dashboard" almost always means the project is still at Opportunity — not that anything is broken. Check the stage before you check anything else. DLP locking the Delivery dashboard is intentional, not a bug: the job is finished and in its defects period.

The back door that confirms your diagnosis

A customer can always reach the tools through Project settings → the tool they want, because that route is not stage-gated. If someone tells you "I can get in one way but not the other", that is the stage gate talking, and it confirms the stage is the cause rather than a permission problem.

3How the stage moves on its own

The stage advances by itself as real work happens. Three automatic moves exist, and one stage has none.

Opportunity→ Tender→ Delivery→ DLP

Creating an opportunity Automatic

A project is created alongside the opportunity, stamped Opportunity. This is where nearly every project starts.
Creating a tender, or moving one past Awaiting Docs Automatic

Moves the project to Tender. Only fires if the project is still at Opportunity, so a second tender on the same project changes nothing.
Winning the job Automatic

Moves the project to Delivery. There are two doors to the same room: dragging the opportunity into a won column, or marking the tender Won. Either one is enough — a job can be won straight off the board without ever having a tender.
Entering the defects liability period Manual only

DLP is never automatic. There is no practical-completion signal wired to the stage, so someone has to set it by hand in Project Settings.

Every automatic move is forward-only

Nothing in the platform walks a project backwards. Losing a tender, cancelling work, archiving a project — none of them reduce the stage. A human changing it in Project Settings is the only way back.

When an automatic move does not happen

Work down this list before assuming a bug:

The project is archived. Archived projects are skipped by every automatic move, silently and by design.
The project is already at or past the target. Forward-only, so there is nothing to do.
The stage is a legacy value — blank, or Stage — on the card. Those are not in the lifecycle, so they cannot be advanced from.
Nothing actually changed. Re-saving an opportunity that was already won does nothing.
The workspace has no won-type stage configured. See the next section — the win is resolved by the stage's type, and if nothing is typed as won, nothing resolves.

4The opportunity board: moving cards does not move the stage

This is the single most common misunderstanding, from customers and internally.

The Opportunity Tracker board showing the workspace's configured stage columns from Identified through to Did Not Proceed — **Opportunity Tracker board:** this workspace's own stage columns — Identified, ROI, Qualifying, Will Bid, Tender, Submitted, Negotiation, Awarded, Lost, Did Not Proceed and Still Deciding — above the pipeline value tiles. Every one of the open columns maps to project stage Opportunity.

Opportunity stages are configurable per workspace, so the column names differ between customers. Every "open" column maps to the same project stage: Opportunity. Dragging a card from Identified to Qualifying to Negotiation does not change the project stage — only creating a real tender does that.

Two projects both showing Tender may sit in completely different opportunity columns, and that is correct. The project stage answers "how far has this job got", not "which column is the card in".

Won columns are matched by type, never by name

When the customer reaches their won column the project moves to Delivery — whatever that column is called. Some workspaces call it Awarded, Leeda calls theirs 100%, Cohesive calls theirs SFA Contract Signed. The platform reads the stage's configured type, so renaming a column is safe. What is not safe is a workspace whose stage set has no won-type stage at all — then nothing resolves and no project ever advances to Delivery. That is worth checking during implementation.

5The tender tracker: which tender stages move the project

Tender Tracker filter chips and register rows showing Awaiting Docs and Won stage badges — **Tender Tracker:** the stage filter chips across the top — All, Awaiting Docs, Pricing, Submitted, Won, Lost, No Bid and Not Proceeding — with the register below showing each tender's Stage badge, including a Won tender and several at Awaiting Docs.

Tender stage	Project stage becomes	Why
Awaiting Docs	unchanged	Tenders are created at this stage, so it is the starting point, not a move
Pricing · ECE · Submitted	Tender	Real bid work has started
Won	Delivery	The job is live
Lost · No Bid · Not Proceeding	Tender, never further	These are past Awaiting Docs, so they advance an Opportunity-stage project to Tender — but losing never moves a project forward to Delivery, and never backwards either

That last row surprises people. A lost tender on a project still sitting at Opportunity will nudge it to Tender, because the bid work demonstrably happened. It stops there.

6Changing Stage or Status by hand

Both fields live in Project Settings → General, in the dropdowns shown in section 1. This is the only way to move a project backwards, and the only control the customer has directly.

Project Stage

Pick the stage and save the page. The change is saved with the rest of the general settings, and it takes effect everywhere immediately — the Home card badge, the dashboard gate and the project picker all pick it up. Setting the stage by hand is a perfectly good fix when an automatic move was missed; it is instant and it does not break anything downstream.

Project Status

Active and On Hold commit the moment they are chosen. Choosing Archived asks for confirmation first, because archiving has side effects beyond the project list. Moving a project out of Archived restores it, and it comes back at the stage it had when it was archived.

"Just re-save the project" does not always work

The stage is only sent to the server when it differs from what the page loaded. So opening Project Settings and hitting save changes nothing at all. If you genuinely need to force the stage to be rewritten, you have to change it, save, change it back, and save again.

7The reports you will get, and what they mean

"The dashboards are locked but we've won this job."

Check Project Settings → Project Stage. If it still says Opportunity or Tender, the win was most likely never recorded in the platform. Check whether the tender is marked Won, or the opportunity sits in the workspace's won column. Recording the win moves the stage automatically. Setting the stage by hand also works and is instant.

"We created a tender but the stage didn't change."

Most likely the project was already at Tender or beyond — the move only ever goes forward, so a second tender changes nothing. Also worth checking that the project is not archived, since archived projects are skipped by every automatic move.

"We changed the stage but the card still shows the old one."

Ask them to refresh. If it persists, escalate — this was a real bug (COR-381, fixed 24 September 2026) where one screen read a stale copy of the stage.

"The stage is right but the dashboard is still locked."

Check the table in section 2. Delivery-stage projects get the Delivery dashboard; DLP ones do not. That is by design, not a fault.

"An archived project changed stage on its own."

It should not. Archived projects are skipped by every automatic move, and the check fails closed — if the platform cannot confirm the archive state, it skips the move rather than guessing. This was fixed on 24 September 2026 after two archived customer projects were advanced by a backfill. If you see it happen now, escalate with the project id.

"Project Settings says Active but the project is archived everywhere else."

Fixed on 25 September 2026. A project archived through Archive Opportunity and Associated Project in the Opportunity Tracker used to write only half the archive record, so the Project Settings status dropdown and some reporting read it as Active while the Home list correctly showed it as archived. The cause is fixed and every affected project across all workspaces was corrected — 138 in total. If a customer reports this shape again, escalate: it means a path we have not found is still doing it.

A card showing "Stage —" instead of a stage name.

Old projects created before stages existed carry no usable value. It is harmless — the platform treats them permissively and unlocks everything. Setting the stage in Project Settings clears it up for good.

"We lost the tender — why is the project still showing Tender?"

Working as designed. Losing is an operational outcome, and that belongs to Project Status, not the lifecycle stage. The project keeps the stage it reached. If they want it out of their active list, they should set Project Status → Archived.

8What to collect before escalating

A stage ticket is fast to diagnose with these and slow without them:

Workspace and project name — and the project id from the URL if you have it
What Project Settings → General shows for both Project Stage and Project Status
What the Home card badge shows — OPP, BID, CON, DLP, or "Stage —"
For a missing-dashboard report: whether Project settings → the tool works, which tells you immediately whether it is the stage gate
If a win is involved: the tender's stage in Tender Tracker, and the opportunity's column on the board — the two can disagree
Whether the project has ever been archived and restored

Ask KAI first

KAI can read this guide from inside Horizon. Asking it "why are the Commercial and Delivery dashboards locked on this project?" will point at the stage gate and cite the section above, which is often faster than opening a ticket.