These are the portfolio's vocabulary - how the company reads across projects without opening them.
Programs
A program is a belonging: a season, a client relationship, a campus, a tour. Projects join programs many-to-many - the pavilion can sit in both Pavilion Series 2027 and a client's program - and membership changes nothing inside the project. Programs pay off in the cross-project views (All Schedules filters by program) and in your own head: they are how "how is the 2027 season doing?" becomes a question the tool can answer.
Rule: create programs for questions you actually ask. A program nobody filters by is a tag with a salary.
Project statuses
⚙ Make it yours - this is one of the most visible customizations in the platform: your status names, your colors, shown on every project card. Each custom status behaves as one of four underlying categories - active, on-hold, completed, or archived - so the platform always knows what "Tentative" or "Confirmed" means even though the vocabulary is yours.
The behaves-as category does real work: "open projects" everywhere in the platform means the living categories - archived and completed projects drop out of default views, pickers, and counts without being deleted. So choose the category honestly: a status that reads dormant but behaves as active keeps stale projects cluttering every list; the reverse quietly hides live work.
Rule: statuses describe state, programs describe belonging - never encode one in the other. A "2027 Season" status would force projects to choose between saying where they belong and saying how they're doing.
Lifecycle
Projects end. Completed and archived projects keep their full history - the element dashboards, the sealed logs, the issued minutes remain the company's memory - while leaving the daily views. Archive promptly when work truly stops: the open-projects convention only helps if "open" stays true. Deletion is the rare, deliberate exception, and the company settings delete log records what was removed, by whom, when - the same paper-trail ethic as everywhere else in the platform.
Mechanics - program and status CRUD, lifecycle settings, and the delete log: Field Guide → Company settings.