How a Leadership Team Uses Hive To Plan & Execute Company Initiatives

Company-wide initiatives exist across companies of all types and sizes — and the leadership team plays a huge part in the planning and execution of it. Although there are many benefits to running organizational programs or projects, it’s not always easy. Even if you’re not the one planning and executing these larger initiatives, you can probably relate to at least one of the following issues:

  • I don’t understand the macro-level initiatives my company is planning.
  • I don’t know who is working on what tasks within larger projects.
  • What’s the next step after I complete this small task?
  • Can I see a high-level view of what’s going on in the organization?

Larger initiatives mean more people, more ideas, and more need for effective collaboration. Luckily, Hive can help with that. Use this quick-start guide to optimize your project flow and structure in Hive, so you can better plan and execute your next company initiative.

Step 1: Define the initiative

If you can relate to any of the questions above, this article is for you. So let’s first think about the types of initiatives your team is taking on. These fall into 2 categories:

  1. Micro-level: On-going, repeatable initiatives that exist within a department (i.e. HR team onboarding, legal team reviewing materials for sign-off)
  2. Macro-level: Department initiatives undergone to achieve KPIs

Good news! You can tackle both of these initiatives in Hive. Once you understand the type of initiative you’re working on, you can get started on the moving parts and tasks within. But before we can build it out Hive, it’s crucial to understand how your team learned about this initiative. Which best describes your initiative?

  1. Triggered by an event in the company
  2. An ongoing project that your team is running for the company
  3. A repeatable tasks that exists or pops-up every week
  4. A response to requests from other teams or departments
  5. Given to the team by leadership

Step 2: Sketch it out in Hive

Depending on your answer to the question above, here’s how you can move forward and build it out in Hive. 

1. If the initiative was triggered by an event in the company:

First you will need to create a new project in Hive for the initiative or task and invite all relevant team members from your organization. To add a new project, click the “New” button in the upper right-hand corner of your Hive window and select New Project. To then add teammates to the project, click the “Edit Project” button and add “Members” to your project. They’ll now be able to access and visualize this initiative. If there are relevant documents or additional information, you can attach them in the Project Overview modal. Access Project Overview by clicking the information button (circle icon with an “i” inside) when you’re in the project.

Another component of Hive that you might want to utilize if a task is triggered by an event in the company is Phases. Every project goes through a process from start to finish. In some industries, this process is marked by stages. For example, a consulting project might have 3 phases: planning, execution, and closing. To use phases when creating a new project in Hive, go to the project navigator, select “+ New Project”, and in the new window click the link “+ Add phases.” When you create a new action, it adds it to the first phase by default.

You change an action’s phase by clicking the dropdown menu at the top of the action card. Once you’ve set up Phases, you can use them in a few ways:

  • Filter all actions in Kanban by status
  • View actions broken down by phase in Gantt view
  • In Gantt view, you can also group actions by phase

2. If the initiative is an ongoing project that your team runs for the company:

This setup is going to look largely the same as the previous, except you will be adding tasks to a pre-existing project. If you need to add team members to the project, click the “Edit Project” button in Hive and add “Members” to your project. They’ll now be able to access and visualize this initiative. To add team members to the specific task, you can either tag them in the comments of the action card, or add them as followers by clicking the blue plus sign on the bottom right hand corner.

If the task is part of a collection of tasks that can all be created using the same framework, it could be beneficial to use Hive Templates. With templates, you can easily create built-out action cards that have pre-existing content, making it easier for your teammates to understand next steps and action items. To access Hive Templates:

  1. Go to your main menu (upper right corner under your profile picture)
  2. Click “Workspace Settings”
  3. Select “Templates”
  4. Click “+ Create New Action Template”
  5. Name the template and provide a label if desired
  6. Add the subactions, assignees, days, and durations. It will look something like the below

To apply a Hive Template, simply open up the action card (or create a new one) and select “Apply Action Template” from the dropdown.

3. If the initiative is a repeatable task that occurs on a weekly or monthly basis:

This is an easy one. Within your new project, locate the repeating task and set the individual action to be recurring. To make an action recurring, simply click on the “Due Date” section of the action card, and click “Set Recurring.” This feature lets you customize the recurring action to repeat on a specific day of the week or date of the month, as well as on a weekly, biweekly, or monthly basis.

4. If the initiative was in response to requests from other teams or departments:

There are a few ways to digest tasks passed from a team or department. Hive Mail and Hive Forms are two great ways to streamline these requests and bring information into Hive without having to manually transfer each request. Here’s how to use each method. 

a) Create tasks from emails with Hive Mail.

If the task is coming from another teammate and you’ve received it over email, you can easily use Hive Mail to create a new task from the email. To do this, simply click into the email from your Hive Mail inbox, then click the checkmark icon above the message. You’ll then be able to access it from My Actions. Bonus: Email threads linked to action cards are dynamic, so they will update with any additional replies that are sent or received. Anyone who has access to the action card will be able to view and reply to the linked messages, ensuring that everyone stays up to date with the latest.

b) Pull information in on the task from a Hive Form.

This is an easy way to intake project or task data in a repeatable fashion. To get started, you first have to enable “Forms” from “Hive Apps” if it’s not already enabled. For easy access in the future, be sure to pin Forms to your left-hand navigation panel. Once inside the Forms window, simply click “Create A New Form” on the upper right hand corner. Utilize the Form builder to compile all of the information you want to gather with your Form.

Next you should set where you want to receive the Form submissions. You can either receive each submission via email, or in a Hive action. If you choose Hive Actions, each form submission will automatically create an action in Hive, within the project of your choice, and assigned to the person you select. Each Form comes with a link that you can share or post on a website. To access the link, scroll to the top of the form and you will see a white box with a link. Click the button “copy” to save it to your clipboard.

5. If the task was given to you by leadership:

If a task is passed down to you by leadership as part of a larger initiative, you should first get access to the project they are working from. You can do this by adding yourself to the existing project, or requesting to be added if there are permissions in place. Once you’re in the project, you can work with leadership to learn more about project set-up, milestones, KPIs, and other components of the project.

When working with macro-level initiatives, Gantt view can be used to better understand the tasks, dependencies, and any other moving parts that are involved. To view a project in Gantt view, enter your project and simply click the “Change Layout” button on the top right. From the dropdown, select Gantt. Within Gantt view, you’ll even be able to customize the tasks and projects to your liking.

Here are a few things you can within Gantt view:

  • Change the timeline – Gantt view is defaulted to show you a timeline of several months, but you can change it. You can zoom in to look a a few weeks or zoom out to look at a project over a whole year or several years.
  • Go full screen – If you want to make your Gantt view bigger, you can expand it to cover your whole screen.
  • Change assignees – Easily assign yourself or your teammates tasks within the larger Gantt view by selecting the task and editing assignee.
  • Add dependencies – Dependencies are tasks that depend on the completion of another to be started/completed themselves. To add a dependency, locate the circle on the right hand side of each task and drag to the beginning of the next action.
  • Add milestones – Milestones are an easy way to track major accomplishments in your project. They are generally used as a indicator to call out a significant event on your Gantt Chart such as a project launch, key deliverable, or presentation date. To add a milestone, click the flag icon to mark each task as a milestone within an action card. The milestone will then show up as a diamond on the Gantt chart.

Step 3: Check Out The Big Picture

Now that we understand how projects can be set up in Hive, it’s time to think about the big picture. How can we better understand how our projects are progressing and tracking towards goals? There are a few ways to do that in Hive.

Portfolio View

First, there’s Portfolio View. This view is the all-in-one place to see the detail of Project Overview combined with the flexibility of a Table View. To access Portfolio View, you’ll need to turn it on in Hive Apps, which you can access under “Apps” on your left-hand side navigator. The beauty of Portfolio View is that it lets you view all of your actions and subactions across projects in once place. This is ideal for teammates who want to better understand how the big-picture is progressing and how initiatives are working together.

To create a Portfolio View, first select the projects you want to include in the view from the “Add projects” dropdown. Next, select items from the dropdown for “Project details and fields” so you can better understand which items you’d like included in the Portfolio View. Utilize the dropdown that says “Add actions and subactions” to pull in the status of the actions and subactions that are living across projects listed on the left. The due date for those actions will appear, along with a checkmark if they are completed. Within the “Actions and subactions” dropdown, you can decide if you want to see specific milestones, too. 

If you manage more than one portfolio and would like quicker access to it, you can save the view and add another Portfolio View as well. To do so, click the Title of the Portfolio View and create a new one. Now both are available in your drop down! To share a view with others, head to the share icon on the right and add your teammates to the Portfolio View. Overall, Portfolio View is best leveraged when looking at multiple projects that have the same action cards and/or custom fields because you can then compare those projects accurately and efficiently.

Analytics

Analytics are another way you can understand the big picture and track tasks across the organization or team. To enable Analytics, visit Hive Apps and toggle “Analytics”  on. From there, you’ll be able to see three standard dashboards that come with every Hive account. My Productivity is a summary of your personal productivity, while Team Productivity is a summary of the overall productivity in your workplace. In addition, Time Tracking provides key insights into how your team tracks and estimates time. With these dashboards, you can better understand progress across teams and the organization. 

Risks and Issues Tracker

Hive’s risk and issue tracking functionality is another great tool you can use to manage initiatives as they unfold. To turn on this feature Hive, simply visit Hive Apps and toggle on “Risks and Issues Tracker.” Your team can now use the tracker to manage the risks and issues in each of your projects in one centralized location.

To add a new issue, open the tracker and enter the name of the risk you would like to keep track of. Be sure to select the project the risk is associated with. The card will now be linked with the project, but it will not show within the project plan itself. You will be able to view the risk in this summary view only. Be sure to try out the different layouts and filters to hone in on the information that is most important to you.

Step 4: Time To Expand

Now that you’ve got your project running smoothly in Hive, it could be time to bring new project members into the fold. Maybe you need to show an external agency your progress, or maybe you’re onboarding new team members. Here’s how to navigate these situations and addi additional members to your Hive platform. 

Adding External Users

If you collaborate with people outside of your organization and need to grant them access to Hive, you can easily do this by adding them as an External User. External users do not have access to your entire workspace. Instead, they are are limited to actions and messages within project(s) assigned to them. To add an External User, use the “Invite” button on your project to open the Invite New Members window. Select the “Guest User” tab and add the email address of the person you want to invite and select the project(s) you want to add them to. After you send the invitation, they will have access to the project(s) you selected.

To add an external user to another project, visit the Project Overview (access by going into the project and clicking the Overview button) and Scroll to the very bottom to the External Users section. Any existing external users for the project will be listed here. To add more people to the project, click “+ Add external user.”

Onboarding Additional Teams

It’s easy to add additional team members to your Hive workspace. To do so, simply press the “Invite” button on your home screen and enter the email address of your teammates. From there, you’ll be able to add them to projects that are relevant to their work. Hive will notify the user when added to the workspace.

Step 5: Optimize your meetings

If your team meets to discuss and work on the initiative, leverage Hive Notes to plan your agendas, collaborate during the meeting, and leave with actionable next steps. To collaborate in real time during your meeting, simply share the Note with other meeting participants. Once inside the note, anyone can contribute ideas and assign tasks by highlighting any text and clicking the checkmark icon. You can add the action to any project in Hive, and assign tasks to anyone on your team, even if they’re not in the meeting. 

The best part is that the status, owner, and due date of these actions are dynamic — this means they will update in real-time from their action card in Hive, so you can review progress right in the Note during the next team meeting. Want to share your meeting notes with someone who wasn’t in the meeting? No problem. Simply share the note via email to keep leadership or external parties informed. Anyone can access the note via email, even if they aren’t a Hive user.


Hive was built with teams in mind. And no matter how many teams are included in your company initiative, Hive can help you work together and make it happen. So follow the steps above and start planning today! You’re one step closer to success already.