Localization Academy

How To Use Hive As Localization Project Manager

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Is Hive any good for localization project managers?

Welcome to another episode in this series, where every month we’ll check out a new project management platform and see how viable it is for localization. All online software will be either free or with a free trial, so you can try it on your own.

In this video, I’ll show you how to use Hive to schedule your localization projects. Together, we’ll plan two simple projects and create one dashboard.


Andrej Zito

This is how you start with Hive. Choose how you’d like to message your team. Use Hive messaging, continue. At first, you may see this, this chat thing here. I like it that it, kind of like a Slack within Hive, where you can easily interact with your team. But for our purpose, this is not what we’re going to use. So I’m just going to hide the chat. And another thing that you get straight out of the signup process is that you get a couple of sample projects. So what I’m going to do, I’m going to leave them here. You can also check them to see what could be possible, different ways how you can organize your projects, using different views. And it also comes with these three demo people or team members. So if you’ve seen any of my previous tutorials for other apps, I usually add two other people: Ai and Christian, which I used to show you how you can assign some tasks to a different person. But we don’t actually use it that much later on in the tutorial. So for now, for Hive, I’m just going to stick to the demo people.

Andrej Zito

Now, Hive needs your permission to enable notifications. I don’t want any notifications. So goodbye, don’t ask again. What we’re going to do, as always, we’re going to start by creating a new project, which will be our project A, which is a very simple one. It only consists of three tasks or I think the way it’s called in Hive, sections. And this is translation, review and delivery. So creating your project, we’re going to create a new blank project without using any specific template because we’re going to set up the structure of our project and the information that we want to track. Project color. I’m going to pick let’s say, the red one. Parent project, we have no parent project. But I’m going to show you later how we’re going to utilize the parent project. And we want to pin it to navigation panel. Due Date. We don’t care about that right now. Now invite project members. This is where you can add more people to have available within your project and I guess interact with them through the project. What I’m going to do is I’m going to add the demo people with a project. So it’s me and three other people. Who can edit project members, I’m going to select only me, project owner. And project visibility, I’ll leave this as default. Next choose layout. So as previously, we’re going to start with table view, that’s where we’re going to set up all the information. And then we’re going to switch to Gandy, once we have everything set up. Here a neat thing here is advanced project settings, phases. I think phases are quite useful. And it gives you another way how you can organize or group certain tasks within your project into these called phases. But you’ll see later on how I’m going to deal with a more complex project, which is Project B. And I’m not going to use phases, although I could use them we’re going to use labels instead, just actually the thing right below that.

Andrej Zito

I think the phases just from the word of phase, it means something like a, like a certain period of time, a significant period of time within your project. So that’s why it doesn’t fit our purpose because we just want to let’s say, group certain tasks and that’s why we’re going to use labels instead. Another thing which is here, which is to me quite awesome, I think I only saw this maybe in ClickUp or monday.com, is that you actually and here you actually have an option to turn it on or turn it off. By default is turned off. So autocomplete parent actions when all sub actions are complete. So this is what I mentioned to you before. In Hive, the tasks are called actions. And so I can guess this means that if you complete all sub actions, then the parent will also be auto completed as well. And another thing here is also actions to define the date of parent actions. This, again, I think, is something which I have only seen in ClickUp, or monday.com. And I think it’s pretty neat feature where, let me show you the calendar. Let’s say the first task starts, I don’t know, let’s say Monday to Wednesday, so it ends today. And then the second sub task, sub action starts on Thursday and ends on Friday. So the parent would actually be from Monday to Friday. I think that’s pretty neat.

Andrej Zito

But what I normally like to do is, let’s say have the flexibility to specify the parent sort of it’s not automatically defined by the sub-actions, so I’m going to leave it unchecked. And then the final thing which is checked by default is allow actions to be assigned weekends. We want this even though we don’t want people to work on the weekends. Simply I want to simply, so that the weekends are shown on the Gantt chart, I think I tried to uncheck this. That’s when you will not see weekends on the Gantt chart, which I think is a little bit of a drawback, because ideally, I would want to see the weekends on the Gantt chart, but not as like the work is happening on the weekends. So that’s that. So let’s create a project. And here we have a project A, welcome to Hive. I don’t need this. So remove, first thing that we’re going to do is we’re going to set up our columns in our table, what is the information that we want to be tracking for our actions?

Andrej Zito

First thing we’re going to do is I’m going to start by clicking in any of these columns, and select the three dots, which gives you some options for how you define your headers. And here under pin size, I’m going to autosize, all columns, so I can actually see the text inside. So we don’t need a description for the task. So I’m going to remove that. We definitely want status. We don’t want this urgent thing. So this is an act or marking of an urgency. We want the due date, we need start date, we don’t need a time specifically, we don’t need labels for this project. So I’m going to hide it for now. And created by, completed by, created date are automatic fields, which you shouldn’t be able to edit yet. I cannot go into it. It’s similar to what I’m using the Notion. So at least, I have an indication of who did let’s say the last edits to a certain task. So I like to keep those around. So let’s go back here. So what we want to do is we set the status assignees. We keep that. Urgent, we remove that, what we said earlier, we want to add the start date, and we have the due date, we don’t need the time, we assume that everything will be COB. Labels, we don’t need those. Now finally, completed date. I think I want to see when the things were completed and completed by whom and I don’t need the creations. Maybe last updated. Okay, so this is our main structure of the information and the data that we want to be tracking for our project actions.

Andrej Zito

Now that we have the structure set up, what I’m going to do, as always, I’m going to start adding the tasks or actions in case of Hive. So first, we start with translation. I think, we have 30,000 words for this one. Now, if you just press enter, and maybe let me resize it again, to make it slightly larger, okay. So once you press enter, you just confirm the, let’s say, the insertion of the title, the action or the task name. But what I’m, what I was missing here is how you get to a new action. So you can see this option here at the bottom, which is quite far away from when you’re editing things. But I found that if you do shift, enter, that’s what’s going to create a new action and you can edit it. So next, we do review and I believe let me look at my cheat sheet and our review is forty hours. Forty hours. And I forgot to do the shift think. And then finally we do delivery. That’s that. Now, next thing that we always do here is that we want to see if we can add another level inside of our, let’s say, main tasks or actions. So I don’t know how you can do it from this screen. But if you open the details of the task, here, you can see sub actions. So this is where I’m going to say that we want to break down the translation into German translation, French translation, Japanese translation and Korean translation. And the way I do this is because I want to have a granule overview for each language on my project. So our project is into four languages. And now I can just expand and collapse it. And I think it looks pretty good. And I’m going to do the same thing for review. And that’s it. So we have our project, we have all, all our tasks.

Andrej Zito

Now let’s set the the information for each task. First of all, for the status, you have these: predefined, unstarted, in progress and completed. By the way, unstarted, I had never heard that word before. Typically, you see, to do or something like that, but it’s just any comment. So as before, what we want to do is we want to, let’s say define statuses, which can be used on the sub actions level. And because you cannot define any, let’s say hierarchy of your statuses, we’re just going to do it graphically. By graphically, I mean, we’re just going to enter something in front of it so that it gives us indication that this data should be used for a sub action. So I use this arrow here. And we’re going to say headsup sent, I’m going to copy this. So start date, we are going to start, I’m going to say that we’re going to start this Monday, or we already started this Monday. So I’ll pick Monday right here. And due date. For some reason, as you have just seen, I’ve only entered a start date, but the due date was inserted automatically. I’m not sure why it’s behaving this way. But we can edit the due date and set it to three weeks from Monday because that’s how much time you’ll need for the translation of 30,000 if you’re doing it by one translator. So we have our dates.

Andrej Zito

Now, this is the funny thing, which I don’t understand. So last time, I did a tutorial for Asana where I couldn’t use Ctrl+C Ctrl+V on some of the values which to me, it was absolutely surprising, to say it in a polite way. It’s, it’s fucked up. So here, we can copy. But it copies it in a very, very odd way. For some reason, it again, as you can see, I just copied the start date. And if I do Ctrl+V here, it adds the date to the due date as well. And I guess that’s why it’s highlighted in I don’t know, orange or whatever this color is orange red, because this I think shows that it’s overdue. So you actually need to copy the due date as well. But if I copy both, I think it doesn’t work. I’m going to select, do Ctrl+ C No, it doesn’t do anything. It looks like you can only copy one value at a time. So I’ll add these things here. And for the final delivery, we’re going to do it on the 31st. That’s what we can keep there. Okay, so completed date. Again, automatic field. Last updated, is there completed by? Again, automatic field as well. What else is there for us to do?

Andrej Zito

It’s only to set the statuses. So this one is in progress and automatically switched to sub-statuses but for sub-statuses is we’re going to say that okay, they confirmed handoff. They confirmed Japanese. We just sent, they didn’t confirm yet and these guys confirmed and review, everything will be unstarted. Well actually for German review, we can say that they confirm headsup. Confirm headsup, blah, blah. And I should be able to copy the status. I can. Okay, good thing. One of the last thing before we leave the table view is that by default you have only the incomplete actions show up. So if you start completing the actions or tasks, then they will probably be removed from the view. So if you want to see all your actions, even the completed ones, which I guess would be my preference, you have to change this to all.
Now that we have this done, let’s change the layout to Gantt chart. And voila, this is our project. So I think it looks pretty good. You can see here the header. The reason why you can see this here as red under Project A is because we have this, we’re grouping by the project. And we’ll see the labels in action for Project B coming soon. You can change your let’s say, scale, or zoom level. I like to keep the weekly one. And this is what I was mentioning to you before.

Andrej Zito

So our weekend is coming up on 11th and 12th, which is these two dates, but they’re not highlighted in any way. I think in most of the other platforms, we saw that the weekends are highlighted. What you can do here, you can see, you can expand, collapse everything, you can use these buttons to collapse and expand everything or you can do it individually. So this is, again, what I was always talking about. We want to have this ability to drill down or go up a level when we want. This to me looks pretty good. It’s a little bit bland, I would say. I’m not sure if I’m missing some settings here. But I don’t think there are that many settings that you can like, let’s say, customize your view here of the Gantt chart, especially what is happening here on the individual actions. Here, you can add more things to show up in this, let’s say the table, not what actually shows up here. And I think we’re done. So this is our first simple project, project A with translation, review and delivery. I think it looks pretty okay.

Andrej Zito

Next thing we’re going to do is we’re going to create another project, which will be project B. And that one will be the more complex one, where we are going to have different scopes for different sets of languages. So I’m going to say this is project B and this one, we’re going to actually copy the settings from Project A. And I’m going to leave this as blue. Why not? Current Project? Not yet. And what are we going to copy, we’re going to copy statuses, signees and approvals. I have no idea what it even means. So let’s continue to the project members, we’re going to keep the same people. Project owner, that’s the same thing. We’re going to start with table view again. And the settings here are the same. Create project. And we have to switch back to the table view. Right, so these are all the tasks from Project A, I can see that the size of the columns is different. So I’m going to autos, autosize the columns again. And now, what we’re going to do first is we’re going to add the labels. And you will see soon how we’re going to use it. So labels, edit the labels. We’re going to use labels, labels will be simply use to sort of tag or label each individual action so that we know what group it belongs to. So for this project B I’m using three groups or in this case, labels, which will be language independent. We have one pre processing, and then we’re going to have actions for German, Japanese, which are the priority languages. And then we’re going to have French and Korean which will be let’s say, tier two languages. I’m going to add an action which will be pre-processing. And I think it’s ten hours and started with the labels. So this is how the labels look like at the end, you have an option to create a new label.

Andrej Zito

One thing that I’m going to tell you right now is because once we switch to the Gantt chart for Project B, there’s that option to group it by labels, which is what we need. And because the labels work, are sorted based on like are sorted alphabetically, it means that I want to prefix them or name them in a way that actually already sorts them for me. First, at the top, I want to have language independent. Let’s give it a yellow one. Add labels to project, project B, we have added like this, okay. And then we want to add more labels. So the second one will be German, Japanese, do it like this. And we’ll do, I don’t know, teal one. Add to Project B. And finally, we’ll add number three, which will be French, Korean. Let’s pick. We have teal one, let’s pick pink one. Add to project B, with label. Okay, so I have all these labels here, what I want to do is I want to remove and I just want to keep the language independent one. And I think if I go to Project B, this is where you pick the labels. And I don’t want all of them here, I only want the ones that I will be using. So three ones, save changes. And now we only have the three options. Thank god. Okay. So now that the setup is done, what I’m going to do is I’m just going to simply add the tasks, or the two different scopes, so German, Japanese, and French and Korean. And I’ll probably speed this up, because it’s a lot of tasks to be added. And I’m going to move on the delivery here below this. So that is our delivery for the first two sets of languages. So now that I open it, what I’m going to do is I’m going to set the label, German, Japanese. And I added it for all the subtasks. And now I’m going to copy the labels into the other things. I’m on. And this is where we start with French and Korean labels. DTP, QA delivered. Okay, let’s play with the date. So pre processing, we’re going to say that we started last Thursday. And we’re going to say that the status is now completed. So this is where you can see that again, for Project B, I need to set it to all because it’s gone. And I’ll expand everything. So that’s why it’s highlighted in green now because it’s a completed task and the confirmed and unstarted, unstarted, unstarted. One thing that I forgot to do before for Project A was to show you the assignees. But it’s just a simple thing where you just select people from the drop down. So for the main tasks, I like to keep them assigned to me. But with German translation, let’s say it’s done by Barb. And Japanese transition is done by Jessica and review is on by Landon so that we see the people on the Gantt chart. I think that should be it for our project B. Now let’s go back to the Gantt chart. And here we are.

Andrej Zito

So right now I think the way you see it is simply based on the manual order, how I ordered them in the table view. But I think if you go here and group them by label, you can actually see these groups here. Okay, so you can see the language independent German, Japanese and French and Korean. I’m not sure if it’s even necessary. I think it’s pretty good compared to this one. Here we can still see the grouping technically because…Okay, so here on this view, when we are just grouping by project, we can still technically see the different groups based on the color right? So the color of the action is based on the label color that we picked. So I know that this teal color is German Japanese, and this pinkish one is French and Korean. But I think if you want to be 100% clear and explicit, you can switch to the grouping by label. Okay, again changed weekly view and this no label is added automatically. I’m not sure how to get rid of it. But this is where we are. And this is our project. And here you can see technically like the umbrella for like German, Japanese, like label like the whole group. And this is how long it takes for German, Japanese. And this is how long it takes for French and Korean. And as I just assigned to people, we can see here, the indication of who is it assigned to. So here you can see the people. If I expand review, you can see that Landon is doing the German review from this time to this time. And that is our project B, a little bit more complex with some more grouping. And I still think it looks really nice and pretty clean.

Andrej Zito

Now finally, what we want to do always, assuming that you don’t only work on one project or two projects, what you want to do is you want to have a way how you can view all your projects in one view. So you can see what you need to do today for all your projects. What you need to do tomorrow for other projects, what other people need to do and so on. This is where we’re going to utilize the Parent Project, because the Parent Project gives us a way where on the Gantt chart like this one, we can actually see the information from all the projects underneath it. Let’s create a new project. And we’re just going to call this my projects. Project color, pick the purple one. And there’s no project. Next project members, I’m just going to set this as private to me. Because I think we’re not going to be adding any specific tasks for my projects. We just want that to be used as a parent project. And choose layout. We’re going to start with Gantt view, do we have anything here? No, create projects. Okay, so this is my project. Now, of course, we have nothing here. And what I’m going to do is I’m going to go back to project A, click here at the top and select the parent project to be my project. Save Changes. Now let’s do B, do the same thing. My projects. Now, voila. If we go to my projects, and we are now looking at the Gantt view, you can see that these are my projects, if I expand everything, you can see everything here in one place.

Andrej Zito

So here, I have clear indication this is Project A, these are all the tasks underneath it, even the sub task sub actions. And I can play with it, I can hide it, I can expand it. And this is what I want to see. And here below that, I can see what is happening on my project B. You can see here, today’s date, that’s the green line. So I know that, I don’t know, today I’m doing translation for Project A. I’m also doing translation for Project B and I’m doing MTPE for a French and Korean under Project B. So very, very simple way how you can add all your projects into one Gantt view. And you can see who is doing those tasks. And this is the beauty of this one, a unified view.

Andrej Zito

And with that being said, I think this is the end of my tutorial for Hive. Very simple way how you can schedule or plan and also monitor your projects, your localization projects or any type of projects using Hive. So let me know if there’s anything that I missed like what you could do more efficiently in Hive. And as usually if you like this series, if this trailer was useful to you, please subscribe to the channel and we’ll be doing more platforms like Hive and Aasana and Clickup and Monday and Notion and what else? I think that’s it. Thank you for your time and I’ll see you in some other video, bye bye.

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