Service Stages How to define the steps a service is delivered in, with expected durations and the document each step produces.

A service delivered in steps gets stages - the route from sold to finished. They belong to the product, so every sale of that service follows the same route.

What A Stage Holds

• Name and description
• Position in the sequence
• Expected duration in days
• Colour and icon, for reading a board at a glance
• Required fields - what must be captured before the stage can complete
• Deliverable document - the template this stage produces
• Active

Expected Duration Is The Useful One

Give each stage an honest expected duration and two things follow: you can tell a customer when their work will be done without guessing, and you can see which stage is actually slow rather than which one feels slow.

Estimate from what has happened, not from what should happen. A stage that has taken nine days for a year is a nine-day stage, whatever the plan said.

Required Fields

What must be captured before the stage can be completed. This is where quality control lives — a stage that cannot close without the measurement, the sign-off or the reference number is a stage that stops producing incomplete work.

Use it sparingly. Requiring five fields at every stage produces people entering placeholder values, which is worse than not asking.

Deliverable Documents

A stage can name the document it produces — a report, a certificate, a handover note. Tying it to the stage means the deliverable is part of finishing rather than something chased afterwards.

Designing A Route

1. Write the steps as they actually happen, not as the ideal.
2. Name them for the state, not the action — "Awaiting materials" stays true while nobody is doing anything; "Order materials" does not.
3. Keep it to five or six. More stages than that and people stop moving work through them.
4. Set durations from history.
5. Add required fields only where the omission causes real rework.
6. Attach deliverables where a step produces one.

Common Questions

Can two services share stages? Stages belong to a product. Similar services define their own, which sounds duplicative but means one can change without disturbing the other.

What if a job skips a stage? Mark it complete with a note. A route that never bends gets worked around outside the system.

Do stages notify anyone? Movement can be picked up by an automation. See Triggers and Events in the Operations section.

How is this different from a pipeline? A pipeline tracks the sale. Stages track the delivery after it is sold.