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Hivelight Overview (Hivelight Essentials)
Hivelight Overview (Hivelight Essentials)
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Written by Ash Kelso
Updated over a week ago

The aim here is to give you a quick overview of the core components of Hivelight and the significant benefits of it to you and your team.

As you may have noticed, the more your team has grown, the more time has been required (emails, meetings, reporting) to coordinate on the work that you need to do. Hivelight is designed to solve this for you so that you can focus on getting stuff done.

Hivelight is where you see and coordinate on what needs to be done, and your practice management system is where you execute the on that work.

Hivelight is built to follow the flow of your day with the things that you need to know, in the order you need to know them, to stay on top of everything and work effectively as a team.

Outline

Quickly find your way around Hivelight

Catch any urgent deadlines for you and your team

Live summary of all matters, sorted by urgency

Organise your priorities and move work around the team

Convert emails to tasks to stay in control of your day

See instantly, where the matter is up to, what needs to be done, and who is doing what

Have the information you need to complete the work correctly and in context

Save significant time assigning and documenting the work with template sets of milestones and tasks to load to your matters

Track the people and organizations and the matters they are involved in

Get help when you need it with help articles and videos, and in-app messaging for support.

Start: Main menu

Most navigation around Hivelight happens via the lefthand menu. Here you can jump between workspaces, view the global dashboard, and access all the main components of the workspace you are currently in.

Step 1: Dashboard

When you log in, this is the first page you see. The dashboard answers the first question - "Are there any urgent tasks for me personally, or deadlines for my team, that I need to attend to before I start on anything else?"

The dashboard makes sure that nothing creeps up on you individually or as a team. It shows you the tasks assigned to you that are about to fall due the soonest, and the milestones (the due dates for the key deadlines and deliverables) that are approaching for the matters that you are working on.

Step 2: Matter list

The matter list addresses the next question - "where are all the matters up to, and which ones require my most immediate attention?"

The matter list solves this for you by providing you with a live summary of all the matters, color coded and sorted by urgency.

With Hivelight, you don't have to go looking for what matters need your attention, we bring them to the top of the list for you, highlight them and summarise their current state.

This is a very powerful matter management tool. You save time as:

  • You no longer have to manually report on the progress of your matters;

  • You don't need to spend any time figuring our which matters to attend to first to keep everything on track;

  • You don't need to be interrupted by others top provide them with updates on your matters.

Meanwhile, management no longer needs to chase people for reporting, and they can make decisions based on live information.

Step 3: Task list

Review the workspace task list to see your workload and the workloads of your team.

Here you can set tasks as 'priority tasks' or use task tags to create a short list of tasks that you want to focus on today (if managing others, you can use these tools to do the same for them too).

The task list helps you to plan your priorities so that your inbox doesn't run your day (Tip: when emails do come in, use the Hivelight Outlook-Add in to ).

There is a workspace task list (showing all the tasks across all the matters in the workspace) and matter task lists (showing all the tasks just within the selected matter).

Step: 4 Hivelight Outlook Add-In

Stay in control of your day. Action emails according to their actual priority rather than simply the order that they arrive in your inbox.

Use the Hivelight Outlook Add-In to convert emails into Hivelight tasks and assign them to yourself or your team.

Step 5: Matters

The matter view deals with the next question - "where is this matter up to, what needs to be done, and who is doing what?"

Without Hivelight, people can loose an amazing amount of time throughout the day answering these questions so that they can get to work. With Hivelight, you have the answers instantly.

As soon as you open a matter you can see what milestone it is up to, what work needs to be done before the deadline for that milestone, and who is responsible for what.

Pick a milestone to progress, pick a task to work on, move it to 'in progress' and click on the options button next to the matter name to open to the matter in your practice management system to action it.

The matter has a number of pages to it for the things you need to do to manage the work:

  • Task board to immediately see the status of the work on the matter;

  • Summary to post status updates and add matter tags;

  • Task list to view and move work around the team for this matter;

  • Matter contacts to keep track of all the people and organisations involved in the matter and what they are doing;

  • Matter notes to record important developments on the matter

5.1 General matter overview

5.2 Task board

The task board the a key engine room for Hivelight. This is where you manage the work of each matter, with automated reporting on your progress.

5.3 Matter summary page

5.4 Matter contacts

Hivelight helps you to keep track of all the people and organisations involved in your matters. Under matter contacts you can create parties, add contacts to them, and assign each contact a role within that party.

5. 5 Matter notes

Step 6: Tasks

The next question after identifying the task you need to complete is - "how do I do the task, and what is the history of the work that has been done to completed it?"

Within each task you'll find the instructions on how to do the work and task notes left by other team members on what has been done to progress it.

Step 7: Roadmaps

Just as you have templates for creating common documents to save time and promote consistency, Hivelight allows you to create templates for common pieces of work or matters to save time and promote consistency in how the work is done and how it is documented by the team.

You can create template sets of milestones and tasks to be loaded to your matters. This saves significant time as you no longer have to manually create most of the common tasks and milestones for your matters.

Add roadmaps to your matters to save time

From the task board of any matter, click on the '+' icon to the right of the progress bar to select a roadmap to add to your matter at any time.

Build your roadmap library

Hivelight also enables truly agile roadmap development. Enabling you to quickly create roadmaps, apply them to your matters, and then improve the roadmaps over time and update your matters with those improvements.

Step 8: Contacts

In the course of running the matter, you'll need to keep track of all the people and organisations involved. Contacts solves this.

You can create contact cards for individuals and organizations and add them to your matters. You can give them roles and group them by what party or group they are associated with.

Support

Hivelight comes with a full suite of help articles and demo videos, plus in app messaging for support.

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