This is too expensive, this is too complicated. And for many people, this might be too simple. So what project management tool won't break the bank is easy to use, yet still has advanced features for real people like you and me? Let's find out.
Views you want to use
Without question, you have an awful lot of choice when it comes to selecting your project management tool. Well, I might argue that Hive may be the very best user experience because it's built by users.
So in this video, I'm going to share with you five of my favorite features within Hive and why you may want to consider Hive for yourself or your team. Now, my number one reason for considering Hive is its multiple views and layouts.
And you may be surprised by that because most of our project management tools will offer a variety of different views.
But whether you prefer Trello or Asana or Monday or some other tool, you probably recognize that they do one view very, very well, and the other views tend to feel like add-ons or things where you can't quite do as much as their prominent view.
Well, here within Hive, not only do we have six different views, but they are all very, very functional. My first view here is the status view, or you might say a standard board view where we can drag and move things around between our different columns.
But a view that is often lacking in project management tools is a team view or viewing those responsibilities by individual members.
Within this view, I can quickly and easily see what I'm assigned, but also what other members of my team are assigned. And rather than just relying on a standard board style view where I would need to open up this card, come over here, select the person, and then select myself, do you know what's so much easier is working within this team view where I can simply just take this and drag it into my column.
That's a lot simpler, a lot faster, and makes a lot more sense depending on who is working on this project at a time. In addition, we have a fully functional Gantt chart view so we can manage our project from a timeline perspective and a table view if you prefer to sort things in a more Excel or spreadsheet-like manner.
Block time on your calendar
The second feature that I love about Hive are the little details that help me be more productive. Here within this particular task, I have all the details that I need to get started, including the due date as to when this should be finished.
But you know what I love about this is just below, we have a feature called Schedule time. How am I supposed to get this done unless I actually make time for it on my own calendar?
Well, all I need to do is select schedule time and my own personal calendar is brought up and I can take a look at the week in advance. Maybe I see a block of time here on Friday where I can dedicate to this particular task.
All I need to do is click and drag, and now that will be added to my Google calendar.
I'm going to select schedule, and now, I don't have to keep coming back to review what I should be doing when if I open up my calendar, here is exactly that time that I scheduled, and when I click on it, I have a direct link to that task. So it will open it up for me and I can immediately go back to work and start accomplishing this task.
Assign tasks with smart options
Speaking of little details that can make such a big and productive difference, I also love the way that Hive treats assignees.
Here we can see that this particular task is assigned to me, but when I click on my name, I can choose if I only want to assign one person at a time or if I want to allow multiple assignees. This is such a valuable feature that most other productivity tools do not include.
So for example, maybe when I'm done with my dependency or my sub-action, I'm going to go ahead and assign this to Kate. I didn't have to remove myself because I have it set to single one at a time. If I need to assign it to myself, I don't have to waste time or effort and go and remove Kate. But if this particular task does require multiple people or multiple eyeballs on it, I can simply select the multiple option.
Now I can go ahead and add a few more of my team members and assign them, and now we are all a part of this task. In addition, Hive has another feature that I absolutely love.
Sometimes when creating a project or a task, you don't know exactly which individual will accomplish the work, but you do know what type of skill set or maybe what type of role should be performing this task.
So here in this example, I've yet to assign anyone, and I'm not exactly sure if it's going to be Kate or Kelley who does this, but what I do know is I can use a placeholder since both of them are copywriters, I'm going to assign it as a copywriter role.
And then when it comes time to accomplish this task, I can allow our two copywriters to decide which one of them will take on this assignment.
Display goals and milestones
Now, a fourth feature that often gets overlooked when it comes to our project management software is creating an overarching goal or an overview of what is going on. Far too often, we set up our projects and they seem to be ongoing.
We're always going to have a number of things that are either unstarted, things that we're working on and things that are completed.
But what are some of those key milestones and are we staying on track? Well, here on the top-right hand corner, you can see that there is an overview section where we can see exactly how many things we've completed, how many things are overdue, and we can also see a summary of our project activity.
So this can be a great place to get caught up to see what has been going on and what is happening within that project.
We also have the opportunity to create our own status updates. So here you can see that just a few days ago, I've let the team know that we caught up in this month, "Nice job, we are back on track."
But if things change, I can come up here and create a new status update. Either we can be at risk or off track, something that everyone who is working on this project can easily see and keep in mind.
But on top of that, we can also create specific milestones and goals. Up in the top-right hand corner, if I select new and select goal, I can enter in a specific milestone. So in this example, perhaps a key goal that we have is to demo the new website to the customer.
I'm going to be the owner, and this is the date in which we need to do this by. And although this is often where we stop with a particular date, we can take things one step further and add a goal measurement.
So whether we want to calculate the number of actions completed or track the number of overdue actions, or maybe we want to manually enter in a number, we can select that here. And what is going to be the project source?
Well, we can say the specific projects and maybe there are two or more projects that are related to this milestone or related to this goal. You can select multiple projects here and go beyond just the scope of the space which you are working on.
You can even choose if you'd like to make another goal, a dependency in the case that you need to hit something else first before you're capable of achieving this goal. Now, when I create this goal, I can see exactly how close are we to completing this particular goal and see if we are on track in hitting that milestone.
User submitted roadmap
Now, the fifth reason why I love Hive as a project management tool is that they truly listen to their users.
Don't believe me? You can go to their public roadmap and see exactly what they're working on, what they are planned to deliver and what they are reviewing when it comes to user requests.
And Hive has a commitment to developing things that receive the most votes or the most amount of feedback here. So if you have a feature that you would like to add. Here, you can easily submit your own feature request or review the ones that have already been submitted, give your supporting vote so it can be included in a future version of Hive.
And Hive is so certain that you'll love their tool. They have a 90-day adoption guarantee. That's right. You can use Hive for a full three months, and if you don't love it, they will pay you back. Of course, you can always get started with their free forever plan, but if you do choose to upgrade to their team's version, you have this guarantee in place. T
o get started with Hive, just go to hive.com or click the link in the description down below.
hank you so much for watching today's video. And remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
