What is hive?

Hive is an online project management portal that gives us the ability to not only manage our projects at a high level but also the ability to chat, comment, and customize it all to our own systems and processes.

Hive has a lot of different and special functionalities that we can use within our teams and across the company. From chat to news and events. This course will teach you the Hive basics and from there you can start jumping in to tasks with confidence.

Navigating Your Dashboard

1

My Actions

My Actions will show you all the actions that have been assigned to you across the workspace. This is your To-Do list! More on this specific section below.

4

Pins

Pin your most-needed projects to the navigation panel to make them easily accessible no matter where you are in the workspace. You may also pin Hive apps.

2

HiveMail

This is how and where you can manage email through Hive. We currently are not using this feature as a company so you may want to unpin it from your pins section.

5

Message Panel

Access your group conversations or your direct messages. Start a new conversation by clicking the new message button. Chat is a great way to stay connected with the team.

3

Projects

The Projects section will display all our of clients. We use clients as "projects" similar to the client folders that you will find on our company Google Drive. You will be given access to all needed clients/projects.

Chat

We utilize HiveChat for urgent questions, group chats across teams, and it can also be used to check in with team members that aren't in your direct department.

The my actions view

Creating Your Own "To-Do"

In this specific section, you can also give yourself small tasks or include action items for yourself. For example, check out the "Do my weekly timesheet!" action above!

You can do this at any time by clicking in the "What needs to be done?" bar in your My Actions area.

This panel is the My Actions section of your dashboard. This is where your tasks will be populated.

All team members will see any tasks that their managers have assigned to them in this list. If an action has a variety of subactions and you are assigned to one, you will also find it here.

Some of our actions are filled with subactions and dependencies. This allows us to control the flow of tasks without overwhelming team member action lists. Tasks that are dependent and aren't ready for the next step will be labeled "Blocked" until they are ready for you to act on.

Organizing your actions is as easy as clicking and dragging things where you'd like them to be.

Your actions section/to-do list has two main categories: now and snoozed. These are here so that you can have even more control of your specific task list.

Now is the list of all the tasks that you need to complete today. This is where new actions assigned to you by someone else will first land.

Snooze, on the other hand, is the list of actions that you have postponed. For all snoozed actions, you set a date for when you want to see them appear on your Now list again.

This can be especially helpful if you have a serious backlog of actions in your list. Team leads will notice that their lists get filled up especially quick with their team's projects, approvals, and other checks. This allows you to take the time to put what you need on the back burner until a designated work time.

For example, let's say you do weekly check-ins on Thursday one week. This would allow you to move your weekly check-in task to populate on Thursday. Maybe the next week you have a big meeting on Thursday, so your weekly check-ins get pushed to Friday. You can now snooze them until Friday of that week.

What About Private Actions?

If one of your actions is personal, you can mark it private. That way no one on your team other than you can see it. All private actions will show an eye icon on the card so you can identify them easily.

You can also change your My Actions dashboard view at any time.

Switching from Kanban and traditional list view can make a world of difference for your personal workflow and processes.

Some team members prefer list views and others will prefer Kanban. This setup gives you the ability to choose what works for you and what doesn't.

What is A kanban board or kanban view?

A Kanban board is a powerful workflow visualization tool. Tasks are represented by cards that are organized in lists. Each list represents a step in a work process.

Simply drag and drop the cards around different status columns as they move through the process. (Think sticky-notes or post-its).

If you click into a specific task on your to-do list, you will be able to get an up-close and in-depth look at what needs done for the task. This leads us to some task management basics.

Task Management

The action card is the main source off all the information you currently need or will need for a particular task. Use it for quick and easy info gathering, preparation, and execution of your assigned work.

Let's take a look at the major function of our action card now. Each action card also features a large variety of action card pieces that can be customized and used in a lot of different ways to give team members the details they need to complete tasks.

In the right column you’ll see who is assigned to the action, when it’s due, and what the card’s status is.

The top bar of the action card tells you which project it’s in, and the bar’s color represents the project color. Move the card to a new project by clicking on the caret next to the project’s name.

To mark your card as urgent, access action templates, or convert your action, head over to the More menu at the top of the card.

Quickly share, delete, archive, or copy your action from the bottom right of the card.

Following the card means you will get notifications in your activity feed for things like comments, status updates, and date changes. Assignees will automatically become followers. Use the comments section on the bottom left of the card to collaborate with your teammates. When you @ mention someone, they will automatically be added as a follower.

To see a history of your card, click on "Show history" at the bottom left of the card.

action card details

Special features

Description: a place to give more details, instructions, or context to the action.
Subactions: if your action is bigger, subactions can break it into more manageable pieces.
Dates: a timeline of start and due dates makes it easy to keep accountable and prioritize with other work.
Labels: a way to group your action with others for a project or activity.
Attachments: documents that will help you perform the action.
Comments: a place to discuss progress with relevant members of your team.

The Basics of Hive