Customizing AchieveIt’s default statuses is a great way to bring your organization’s verbiage into the AchieveIt workflow. Perhaps you would like to report to your executive team that a plan is “Completed” instead of “Achieved” or maybe your organization doesn’t want to say a project is “Canceled” but instead would like to set it as “Delayed”. All of this is possible from the Custom Statuses management page.
How to Customize your Organization’s Statuses
The Custom Statuses management page gives a User Manager the ability to customize their organization’s statuses. On this page you can change the name and color of all 7 of AchieveIt’s default statuses. Follow the steps below to customize one or more of your organization’s default statuses.
- Make sure you are a User Manager. User Managers are the only users who are able to access the Custom Statuses management page.
- Navigate to the Custom Statuses management page by clicking on Settings button in the navigation bar. If you are a User Manager, you will see the “Custom Statuses” option in the dropdown. Click on this option.
The Custom Statuses dropdown option - Choose which status you would like to customize. In this example, we will be customizing the “On Track” status.
The "On Track" status - To change the color of the “On Track” status, choose the paintbrush icon to the right of the “On Track” status name. In the color picker you can select from our default palette or enter your own hex color code. Doing so will set the custom color for the “On Track” status.
The Color Picker - Enter a custom name for the “On Track” default status by typing into the text box, to the right of the paintbrush icon. As an FYI, there is a 25 character limit for custom names.
The "On Track" status, renamed to "Smooth Sailing" - If you are unhappy with your choices, you can reset the status back to its default state at any point by clicking on the reset icon to the right of the row. This will reset the status back to its default state, erasing any changes you have made to that status.
The "Reset" icon - If you are unhappy with ALL of the choices you have made (don’t worry, it happens to the best of us) you can click “Cancel” at the bottom of the page. This will remove all changes made since you last saved.
- If you would like to reset all of the statuses back to their default values, click on the “Reset All to System Default” button.
- Once you are happy with your customization, click on the “Save Changes” button in the bottom left of the page. Congratulations, you have just customized a status!
The "Save", "Cancel", and "Reset All" buttons
The Effects of Customizing Statuses
Statuses are used throughout AchieveIt to show what state your plans (and plan items) are in. Customizing your statuses will change those statuses for all plans in your entire organization. That being said, there are several places in AchieveIt that are affected by custom statuses which may not be top of mind. Here are a few different places to take note of when changing your statuses:
- Reports
All plan items in your entire organization are affected when customizing statuses, which means that all reports will be affected to some degree. Some examples of these reports include the List View reports (Excel, PDF, and Word/Rich Text), Custom Dashboard reports, and all of the reports accessible via the Reports page.
- Custom Dashboards
Almost all widgets within Custom Dashboards pull data from plans or plan items. Make sure that you are taking all of your organization’s dashboards into account when you customize your organization’s statuses. - Email Progress Update page
Users who are assigned the Contributor user type will almost never be submitting updates directly from within AchieveIt. Instead, these Contributors will most likely be submitting their updates via the Progress Update page. More information about the Progress Update page can be found here: Submit a Progress Update
As a User Manager, you must make sure that these Contributors understand the Custom Statuses and what they mean. This will ensure that they are providing accurate updates for their assigned plan items.