"Stage Statuses" - Assign Project Statuses at "Stages" of a project

[#1]

We create standard sections of our projects that correspond to different stages of the project lifecycle. We would like to set early stages of the project as one status (e.g. "Current") and later stages as another status (e.g. "Planning"). This would significantly help with the ability of firing the right notifications at the right time, executing on early deliverables, while maintaining the ability to build later stage deliverables without disruption. This would help with both waterfall and agile shops.