Lifecycle & Dates

Applications, Integrations, and IT Components move through a five-stage lifecycle from planning to retirement. Albumi does not let you pick the current stage from a dropdown — status is computed from the five lifecycle dates you set and today’s date. Set the dates correctly and the status takes care of itself.

This page is the authoritative reference for that model. Per-entity concept pages describe what each date means for that entity; the model itself lives here.

How status is derived from dates

Given five optional dates — Plan, Phase-In, Active, Phase-Out, End-of-Life — and today’s date, Albumi returns the latest stage whose date is today or earlier:

End-of-Life date is today or earlier → End-of-Life
Otherwise, Phase-Out date is today or earlier → Phase-Out
Otherwise, Active date is today or earlier → Active
Otherwise, Phase-In date is today or earlier → Phase-In
Otherwise, a Plan date is set (even if in the future) → Plan
Otherwise → Unknown

The function is evaluated every time the entity is read. The same entity can show a different status tomorrow than it shows today, without anyone editing it.

You cannot set status directly. There is no status field on the edit form. If you need to move an entity from Phase-In to Active, you set the Active date; you do not “change status”.

The five dates

Each date marks the real-world moment the entity entered (or will enter) the next stage. They are ordinary calendar dates, not timestamps.

Date	Meaning
Plan	Planning started — the entity exists as a decision.
Phase-In	Build, pilot, or rollout began.
Active	Entity is in production use for its intended purpose.
Phase-Out	Retirement has started — replacement in progress, use declining.
End-of-Life	Entity is fully retired.

All five dates are optional. The form accepts any subset; the derivation rule above handles missing values by treating the entity as still in the last stage whose date has been reached.

The five stages

Each stage is the interval between two dates. End-of-Life is the exception — it is a point, not an interval, because nothing follows it.

Stage	Starts when	Ends when	What the EA can assume
Plan	Plan date is reached (or today if earliest)	Phase-In date is reached	Decision made, no build yet. Appears in roadmap, not in current landscape.
Phase-In	Phase-In date is reached	Active date is reached	Being built or rolled out. Not yet authoritative; changes still expected.
Active	Active date is reached	Phase-Out date is reached	Production. Treat as authoritative for its capability, flows, or technology.
Phase-Out	Phase-Out date is reached	End-of-Life date is reached	Being retired. New dependencies on it should be rejected.
End-of-Life	End-of-Life date is reached	—	Retired. Kept in the landscape for history; should carry no live relations.

Stage timeline

gantt
    title Lifecycle stages between dates
    dateFormat YYYY-MM-DD
    axisFormat %Y
    section Stages
    Plan         :plan,      2024-01-01, 2024-07-01
    Phase-In     :phasein,   2024-07-01, 2025-01-01
    Active       :active,    2025-01-01, 2028-01-01
    Phase-Out    :phaseout,  2028-01-01, 2028-07-01
    section Point
    End-of-Life  :milestone, eol, 2028-07-01, 0d

The dates you set are the stage boundaries. End-of-Life is drawn as a milestone because nothing extends past it.

Status is time-dependent

An entity with Active date 2025-01-01 and Phase-Out date 2028-01-01 will be Active all through 2027 and switch to Phase-Out on the morning of January 1, 2028. No edit, no approval, no notification — the query simply returns a different status because today has moved.

Implications:

Lifecycle reports are a function of the date they are run on. A portfolio view “as of today” is not a stored snapshot.
Historical status at any past date is reconstructable from the dates alone; Albumi does not persist a separate status column.
Scheduled transitions require no workflow. If you know an application retires next quarter, set its Phase-Out date now and move on.

Correcting reality

When the world disagrees with the plan — a go-live slips, a retirement is pulled forward — edit the date, not the status. The entity’s status changes automatically the next time it is read.

Entities that use this model

Three entity types have a dated lifecycle:

Each entity’s concept page covers what the five dates mean in its specific context.

Other entities — Organization, Data Object, Business Capability, Initiative — have their own status models unrelated to these five dates. See their dedicated pages.