Onboardings

Onboarding states

How active, paused, and done differ in capacity, risk signals, and customer visibility.
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The state field on every onboarding holds one of three values: active, paused, or done. State is independent of phase. A paused onboarding can sit in any phase. The state controls what counts toward team capacity, what Pi watches, and what the customer sees in the portal.

Active vs paused vs done

Behavioractivepauseddone
Counts toward CSM capacityYesNoNo
Pi risk alerts runYesNoNo
Target launch slippage trackedYesFrozen at pause timeFinal value locked
Phase moves allowedYesNoNo
Tasks can be editedYesYesRead-only
Comments acceptedYesYesYes
Visible in customer portalYesYes, with Paused bannerYes, with Launched banner
Counts in on-time launch reportsPendingPendingYes

When to use each

Active is the default. Every new onboarding opens here. Leave it active as long as work is moving, even if it’s slow. Pi handles slow.

Paused is for blocks coming from the customer’s side: legal review, holiday freeze, key contact on leave. Pausing freezes the target launch date for slippage calculations and silences risk alerts. You’re telling Pi “we’re waiting, don’t ping us.” When the block clears, set the state back to active and the target launch shifts forward by the pause duration.

Done is terminal. The customer launched and adoption work, if any, lives in their customer history from here on out. The onboarding becomes read-only. Tasks, comments, and the audit log stay intact.

Changing state

Open the onboarding and click the State pill in the header.

  • Active > Paused asks for a reason and an expected resume date. Both land on the audit log.
  • Paused > Active is a single click. Pivotal recalculates the target launch slippage from the pause duration.
  • Active > Done asks you to confirm the launch date. Pivotal sets launched_at to that date and stamps the on-time launch report. You can’t go from paused to done; resume first.
  • Done > Active is admin-only. The onboarding reopens and launched_at clears.

Multiple onboardings, one customer

A customer can hold multiple onboardings in different states. Common pattern: one done onboarding for the initial product, one active onboarding for a second module. The customer’s health score aggregates across all of them, weighted by recency.

Gotchas

  • Pausing doesn’t pause notifications on tasks already due. If a task hits its due_date while the onboarding is paused, the assignee still gets the email. Adjust due dates when you pause if you don’t want assignees getting pinged.
  • A customer who’s in at_risk or churned doesn’t auto-pause their onboarding. Decide explicitly.
  • The Workbench’s default filter hides done onboardings. Add State: done to a saved view if you want to see them in your list.

Email help@pivotal.app with a screenshot of where you got stuck and the customer or onboarding id from the URL.