Both the admin team (who owned client onboarding) and the project management team (who handled creative delivery) needed the ability to add new items into the system as quickly as possible — without cutting corners on essential information.

A New Client form empowered the admin team to generate a new client profile in the system (fully-populated with essential resources and reporting data) that was instantly ready to house new projects and campaigns.

Initiating a new project needed more heavy lifting than a form submission — instead, I built a set of customized project templates designed to accommodate all of the inputs and phases needed for multiple common project types. Now, project managers could begin project kickoff with a tested structure in place, not from scratch.

I used Hive’s native time tracking functionality and the premium Timesheets app to design, test, and train a brand-new time tracking workflow for the agency.

Because this new system launch marked an update to WJ’s policy (not just their tools) we needed to ensure that the process was as easy to use as possible, in order to support creatives through the change from one busy week to the next.

I created a set of Time Categories (billable and non-billable) that matched their previous tracking system and linked with billing rates to feed directly into budget tracking. Creatives and account directors could track time within an assigned task or directly in their weekly timesheet, before submitting it for review and approval.

Each project owner acted as timesheet approver for the hours tracked against their project, with the ability to (ahem) gently remind creatives to submit late timesheets and expanded timesheet reporting capabilities.

I took the project management team from four tenuously-connected tools to one comprehensive system workflow, measurably reducing friction for each new project kickoff.

A custom-configured Gantt view (packaged into the project template) let project managers visualize phases, deliverables, and workback schedules in just a few clicks, to solve scope and timing issues more quickly.

When it came to assigning work (and not overloading their creative team) I leveraged Hive’s premium Resourcing app. By entering a task’s estimated hours and assigning an individual team member, the Resourcing app instantly presents a visual and quantified snapshot of their daily workload, using custom threshold settings to clearly flag when conflicts occur.

This enabled project managers to much more quickly and confidently allocate new work for the team and maintain direct insight through the daily ebbs and flows of agency work.

With the previous system, the admin team was slogging through an hour of report generation every week in order to provide timesheet and billing data to agency management.

Hive’s Dashboard reporting enabled us to pre-build a set of reports that automatically tracked project and task status, tracked time, budget burn, and more — all updated live as changes were made in the system.

Dashboards could simply be re-filtered and shared, saving the team a ton of time and effort.

When WJ’s onboarding project was underway, Hive had not yet released its out-of-the-box CMS app — so I set out to make my own, using Hive’s native project and task functionality.

The custom CMS environment I built for the account directors comprised two sections — one which supported their opportunity pipeline and one designed for quarterly client forecast reporting.

Each new opportunity was entered via a form which captured the key information and tags required to properly visualize and progress the opportunity through the system. Tasks represented opportunities and moved through statuses representing sell probability, with scope, value, and statement of work information added throughout the process.

Both the opportunity pipeline and client forecast were paired with companion Dashboards that provided accounts leadership a complete and highly visual snapshot of the agency’s sales landscape.

A major upgrade from Excel Online.

Although the Hive system offers a native “task import” feature, I needed to find a way to import 100+ “projects” into the new system, representing client profiles.

I wrote and tested complex scripts for Hive’s AI app, Buzz, to import each client profile from a CSV list, mapping each column to the correct fields in our project template.

From day one, WJ was approaching this new system launch with change management in mind.

Their account directors and creative teams had already endured one “failure to launch” system upgrade and needed to be completely set up for success this time.

In order to help everyone at the agency feel confident in the new system, I wrote and published a detailed training document for each role — admins, project managers, creatives and account directors.

Each document helped its assigned group focus only on the steps and policies that applied to their day to day work, getting them familiar with the flow and function of the system and giving them a failsafe resource to refer to when they tried new features.