The Workbench module provides you a customizable editorial workflow. Here is a quote about it (from the module's project page):
... provides overall improvements for managing content that Drupal does not provide out of the box. Workbench gives us three important solutions:
- a unified and simplified user interface for users who ONLY have to work with content. This decreases training and support time.
- the ability to control who has access to edit any content based on an organization's structure not the web site structure
- a customizable editorial workflow that integrates with the access control feature described above or works independently on its own
These features benefit the end users as well as Drupal Site Administrators and Technical Support.