Milestone explained
Milestones drive a lot time saving functionality in Hivelight, including the color-coded progress bar and automated reporting you see on the matter list.
Working on legal matters, you will likely have in your mind some of the key deadlines and deliverables that mark real progress points in the life of a legal matter. These are good candidates for milestones in Hivelight.
In Hivelight, we have matters, and the matters have milestones, and the tasks belong to those milestones. So you need to have at least one milestone on a matter to start adding tasks to it.
The milestones are the big-picture deadlines and deliverables in the matter (e.g. Intake stage, medical records obtained, trial date, settlement conference). Under each milestone you have the tasks that track the work that needs to be done before the milestone falls due.
breaking the work up into milestones has many benefits, such as:
Immediate visibility of where a matter is up to;
Tracking major deadlines at volume;
Providing early indication if the matter is running behind schedule;
Providing you with a sense of progress and keeping things outcome focused;
Helping staff to quickly understand the structure and process of the matters they are working on.
How to create a milestone
Scenario 1: Starting with a blank task board
If there are no milestones on the task board, you'll be presented with two boxes.
Click on the one that says 'Create a Milestone'.
Scenarios 2: There are already other milestones on the task board
To create a milestone click on the '+' icon to the right of the progress bar.
Entering the milestone details
You'll now be show the 'Create Milestone' dialogue box where you can enter the milestone details.
The details to enter are:
Milestone name (mandatory)
Milestone description (optional) - this is a place to explain what the milestone is about, or to put links to useful resources.
Due date (mandatory)
Target date - this will be set as equal to the due date by default, but you can change it to an earlier date.
Checkbox to mark the milestone as a 'key event'.
Note that the due dates for the tasks under this milestone can only be set as equal to or earlier than the milestone target date. This ensures that you will hit the deadlines you have set if you complete all the tasks by their due dates.
Key events
The idea with the 'key event' property is to help you keep visibility of the really critical milestones that exist in a matter. For example, you might have 10 milestones, and 2 of them are really important to be prepared for. If a milestone is marked as a 'key event' it will be displayed in the top right of the matter banner if it is the next 'key event' milestone coming up.
Due dates and target dates explained
Having both a due date and target date for a milestone gives you the option to have a soft deadline (target date) while still keeping track of the hard deadline (due date). This can be useful when dealing with mission critical deadlines on a matter, like a statute of limitations date.
Each milestone has a due date and a target date.
The due date is the hard deadline by which the tasks must be done by.
The target date is the soft deadline by which you aim to have the tasks done by.
The target date can be equal to or earlier than the due date.
You will likely set the target date equal to the due date on most occasions (and Hivelight will do this by default), but there will be 'mission critical' deadlines that you'll likely want an earlier target date for - e.g. statutory time bar date, filing dates etc.
Having a target date and due date for each milestone allows you to have that earlier soft deadlines, while keeping track of the hard deadline as well.
Milestone layout
The milestones you create will appear in the task board progress bar as dots. Click on each milestone to select it.
Key features:
Each milestone gets a simple kanbann board where you can add tasks.
Each milestone has a milestone options bar. Click on the bar to get access to options like
Edit dates
Shift milestone and task dates
Delete milestone
Edit the name and description of the milestone
