No matter the customer or system, a Transition moves through five phases: Designate, Preserve, Decommission, Snapshot Access, and Disposition. The five phases are deliberately simple so they communicate to executive and user audiences alike.

1) Designate: the system is registered as a future target but still in active use.

2) Preserve: the long, work-heavy phase — it opens with Configuration (schemas, layouts, bots, target lists, testing), runs through the Live Snapshots period, and culminates in Final Capture once the customer declares read-only.

3) Decommission: a brief event-phase where the legacy system is shut down.

4) Snapshot Access: the long-tail phase, where snapshots are authoritative and access can span years or decades.

5) Disposition: triggered by Operational Sunset, when records are exported and the relationship winds down.

Internally the factory tracks far richer sub-states — Configuration sub-tasks, Overlap progress, Final Capture completion percentages — which surface in the Transition Governance module but stay out of the clean five-phase narrative.