Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Almost any kind of business interaction can be launched with Hi-flier, including: 

• Making a deal, from proposals and presentations, to contracts and signatures 
• Finalizing marketing assets, from creative brief to technical spec and beyond 
• Registration with a government agency, from template to review and submission 
• Getting a funding proposal approved, from detailed worksheet to spending plan 
• Closing a real estate deal, from offer to inspection to signing on the dotted line 
• Managing a legal case, from discovery to settlement
• Completing a learning assignment
• Anything you want! 

Where are you striving with others for great results every day?

There are a few ways. First is with a clean slate, click on “Plan Missions” in the sidebar. There, you can click “+ Create Mission”. Name and describe your Mission, choose a date to start or your desired completion date, and then choose a motion to start with. Remember, you can change all of this later! It’s just to get you started. 

You can also try our Quick Start Templates, which represent best practice for the most common Missions for those people that benefit the most from Hi-flier, such as consulting, business development, and learning. Like all Missions, they can be customized for your needs. These templates already have all the motions, roles, instructions and days to complete, so they’re ready to go and should be great starting points.

Another way is to use an organization template. These are templates that someone else in your organization may have saved, or that you might have saved at some point. Just like the Quick Start Templates they also have motions, roles, instructions and days to complete. Just assign people and link business items and hit “start”.

When you create a Mission, it starts as a draft, or planned Mission, and it’s for you to model and change as you wish. Every change you make is automatically saved but no one else will see it or be invited to participate until you click the “Start” button to the left of your Mission. 

There is an automatic check that only fully designed Missions are shared. As such, you need to assign people to all roles and fill in all dates. This is usually super fast based on starter templates. Then the start button will turn from grey to Cali-blue and you’ll be able to initiate your Mission. You can also do it later. Just keep in mind that you’re the only one who can start the Mission.

When you do, the Mission will be active, and everyone will receive an email saying they have been added. They will be able to see the entire Mission, unless you make certain motions private, and receive important alerts about it.

To help you achieve your business goals or objectives, Missions have clear time expectations, which are the sum of the days to complete each motion. They can be set to start on a certain date, with the days given to each motion adding up to the Mission deadline, or you can choose an end date and the motion durations will be adjusted to reach it. 

Anyone! Though they need to be invited to Hi-flier and added to the Mission, they don’t need to work at your company, be part of an existing team, or join a group or channel. By design, Hi-flier is lightweight so any ad-hoc group can be brought together to accomplish a particular goal. Participants simply respond to your request and take action.

To invite someone to a Mission, first create a Mission. In the Flier Controls panel, scroll down to People and click on “+Invite”. Enter the person’s email address and name and they’ll receive an email invite to Hi-flier and your organization. The good thing is, you can keep designing the Mission now including them, right away.

You can find Missions that have been completed or canceled in the “Completed Missions” tab. They serve as a record of what you’ve accomplished and are part of a searchable archive by Mission name, roles, people and ownership. 

Flier Controls are everything you need to set your Mission up for success and surmount any obstacles along the way, such as adding business items, motions, and people e.g. subject matter experts to break through! Access the Flier Controls tab at any time to make modifications to your Mission.

Each of the 12 motions represents a specific milestone or result that moves your Mission forward. They can be used in any order and as many times as you need to achieve your Mission.

Gather

Contributors collect facts or inputs related to a given topic.

Create

Create something or fill out a template. Authors help with inputs or edits.

Review

Review of a draft or file, with request for feedback. 

Approve

Material is shared to be approved formally. 

Decide

Multiple contributors provide material which is decided on.

Confirm

Material is shared and confirmed viewed by receivers.

Negotiate

Two parties negotiate an agreement. Optionally, a subject matter expert helps facilitate.

Sign

Formal signing of an agreement by one or more parties.

Plan

Jointly create an action plan to coordinate and approve to-dos.

Implement

Implement a plan and track multiple to-dos.

Pay

Make or receive a payment and get acknowledgement of receipt

Yes. See Control & privacy for more information.

Each motion has the particular roles provided that are required to complete each motion. Across all 12 motions there are three role types that additionally make clear who is participating in what way. These are based on the RACI-role types that are familiar from project management.

The types help everyone understand what to expect from whom, and who to ask for help: 

• Blue / A: The accountable person for a motion, the one who is seeing this particular motion through. If you have questions, they are the one to ask.
• Cali-blue / R: The responsible people, the heroes, the ones that are actively doing or contributing something. They are the ones to mark their status as “I’m done”, in which case their color turns to gold. If they can’t move forward, they choose “I can’t do it”, which turns their color and that of the motion to red. The signal tells everyone, especially the accountable person, to be in touch and figure out a new way forward.
• Green / I: The informed people, the ones that need to know, but aren’t actively contributing. They might be stakeholders or subject matter experts.

Organizations can be a company, family, committee, or any temporary group of people organized around a shared topic or area. You might have a larger goal that is broken into Missions to complete to accomplish that larger goal.

Anyone who is invited to an organization can be assigned a role in a Mission, and people can belong to as many organizations as they want.

To invite someone to an organization, click on Invite on the Mission Control for that organization. 

You can also invite someone by including them in a Mission. In the Flier Controls panel, scroll down to People and click on “+Invite”. Enter the person’s email address and name and they’ll receive an invite. You can then add them to a role in a Mission. 

In Hi-flier, everyone is empowered to help out so anyone in your organization can invite someone else. But only the organization owner can remove someone from an organization. That can be done on the Mission Control under Settings.

To toggle between organizations, click on the drop-down menu in the top left corner and select one or create a new one. Each organization is distinct, so that on the Mission Control, you’ll see only the notifications for that organization’s Missions and only those Missions listed in the menu on the left.  

Yes, optimization is the name of the game! Even after the Mission is started, the Mission owner can still add and remove motions (as long as they are still in the future), change the order of motions or their dates, add and remove roles or people, and add or remove business items.

You can also cancel the Mission as the owner— if, for example, some business opportunity will not go forward. People will receive a notification that the Mission has been canceled and it will be moved to Completed Missions so that progress made is not lost, and so it could still be used as a template for a future opportunity.

Missions always have an owner and the invited participants. 

Only owners can make big changes like:

• Starting and canceling a Mission
• Adding or removing motions. Add motions from the Flier Controls panel. To remove a motion that hasn’t started yet, click on the trash icon in the upper right side of the motion block.
• Changing the motion order—simply click on the motion you want to move, then drag and drop it in the new order. Make sure you change the dates!
• Setting specific motions to private mode
• Adding or editing the Mission name and description, the motion sub-headers and instructions
• Removing participants
• Removing business items
• Changing timelines

To remove a specific person from a role, either remove the role or replace the person by dragging someone else from your Flier Controls and dropping them into the role. Click on a person in your Flier Controls menu and drag to the motion. You’ll see the bubble grow a little larger when you hover over roles so you can drop them into the right role.

In the spirit of everyone helping to optimize and make the Mission a success, everyone can:

• Add participants, if, for example, they know a subject matter expert who can help break through a tough spot, or they need someone to substitute for them
• Change people’s roles if, for example, they need to delegate work to someone else
• Add business items to a motion for relevant input
• Make a comment
• Receive notifications on the motion or Mission completion
• See the Mission Logbook
• Duplicate a Mission or save it as an organizational template

Yes, you can change the role, from a contributor to a watcher for example, if the action you need to take has changed. Keep in mind that the owner of the Mission or the motion accountable may be relying on you, so make sure to leave a comment about the change.

If you need help, you can create a new role by dragging a person from the Flier Controls menu into the Mission. Or, you can reassign your role by dragging a person into it to replace you.

Only people invited to participate in a Mission can see that Mission, and they will generally see the whole Mission. However, the owner of the Mission can make particular motions private, meaning that only the participants of that motion can see the details. This can be important when working across companies or with clients you don’t want to see everything.

Yes. If you’re the owner of the Mission you can make specific motions private, meaning that only the participants of that motion can see the details.

If a motion is set to private, people not included in that motion will only see that there is one and what it does. They will see an icon of an eye with a line through it and will not be able to open the motion to see who is participating, their role, instructions, comments, or business items.

If you are able to change the privacy settings on a motion, you’ll see an eye icon in the upper right corner of it. Click the icon to change the setting to private and it will change to an eye with a line through it.

The Mission owner can choose to make that motion private to everyone who isn’t participating. You’ll see an icon of an eye with a line through it when a motion has been set to private.

In order to keep Hi-flier easy to access for everyone, it’s entirely cloud-based. That means business items are not uploaded or saved to the Hi-flier app. Instead, you’ll create links to documents through your Dropbox or Google Drive account to add them to a Mission.

Make sure your permissions in Dropbox or Google Drive are set to allow people to access the linked business items.

If you can’t complete a motion that you’ve been assigned to, you can select “I can’t do it” from the drop down when you click on your role. This changes the circle around your role to red to let everyone know there is an objection that needs to be cleared – good to know sooner than later. 

If a participant cannot complete their action in a motion, they have the option to select “I can’t do it” at which point the circle around their role will turn red. 

They, or the Mission owner, can assign someone else to the role by dragging another person from the Flier Controls into the role. If they are late, they will get email reminders and continue to see the status on their Mission Control.

The Mission owner can change the dates of any motion that has not yet started, to either give people more time or shorten timelines if things are moving more quickly than expected. Keep in mind that participants may have checked their role at the beginning of the Mission and planned accordingly.  

The Logbook is a system of record for everything that’s been done in an active Mission. It lets everyone see what’s happened, when, and by whom. To access the Logbook, click on the Logbook tab on the right side of any Mission.

Any Mission can be duplicated or templated. If they’ve been completed, you’ll find them under the “Completed Missions” tab.  

The best part is, you don’t have to be the Mission owner to take advantage of this feature! Templates will be saved to the organization and available to anyone in the organization. Once selected, they will show up in “Planned Missions” to fine-tune for the next client or opportunity.

Click on the profile icon in the upper right corner of Hi-flier. Here, you can control how your name appears, what you do, and how you can be contacted. Click “Choose a file” to select a file to upload or “Edit profile picture” to replace an existing one. 

As of now, the only information visible to others is your name and picture but, in the future, Hi-flier will give you the option to create a publicly visible profile for prospective clients and business partners.

We have a strict privacy policy and don’t share any of your data with third parties. Within the product, we strongly believe in safeguarding your data and our goal is the best protection possible. We’d love to hear from you about any privacy or security concerns you may have.

Yes. We need and want your feedback! Let us know what you expect to do that you can’t, what you don’t understand or can’t figure out how to do, and anything else that you think would improve the experience. We’re continually improving and will incorporate as much of your feedback as possible.

Give Feedback

“Private” means that it’s not for everyone yet, purely by invite only. “Beta” refers to the software not being ready for large-scale release. We’re still building the product, so there may be bugs or functionality that is not yet complete, and we reserve the right to limit users per our terms of use.