One of the biggest benefits I’ve found with the ubiquity of Slack is setting up Slack teams with our clients. Remember too that as well as the built-in formatting, there’s a whole host of Slack apps that you can bolt-on, including project management apps for some of your favorite PM tools such as Asana, Trello and Jira that you can use to integrate into Slack to connect your project communication more directly with your projects management tools. It couldn’t be easier to get reviews on your emails/Basecamp posts from your project teams, your PM teammates, or even just a single individual. Having the team weigh in on what we are telling the client and how can ensure a consistent, cohesive message is being delivered to the client team by all members. I regularly use the Slack “post” functionality to draft and review critical or potentially sensitive emails and messages. Snippets are great for quick notes from meetings, or even agendas. You can also use the actual “snippet” function to write or post longer form notes that are still easy to access and don’t cloud up the Slack channel view, as they can be “minimized”. We often use this formatting for YTBs (Yesterday, Today, Blockers) to make those messages easy to scan and find:īut it can also be used for any simple list or callout: For a normal message, use ` ` ` before and after your message to wrap it in its own box. Slack provides you a plethora of opportunities to clarify, improve, and polish your communication.įirst, formatting your messages in digestible, scannable snippets could not be easier. Use Slack’s built-in formatting tools to make communication clearer Reminders are quick, simple, and can make you look 100% on top of things! 3. Keeping track of those DMs can be tough, so if you can’t respond to someone right way, give yourself a quick reminder to follow up. If you are on multiple projects, chances are you have team members hitting you up multiple times a day on Slack. Reminders can be useful to you individually as a PM as well. You can also remind your team to review an agenda or post questions just prior to a client meeting, or even just remind them that they are awesome. Once we decided on when we would deploy that week, it was easy enough to say /remind #myprojecteam feature freeze is ON! At 2:00pm Wednesday. On one project, we had variable deploy times, but always wanted to stop feature development two hours prior to a deploy. One of my favorite tools is, the “Remind” function. Now that you have a team-specific Slack channel, you have many options at your disposal for improving your team interactions. Keeping the conversation flowing between the team creates a better shared understanding of progress, blockers, and work remaining, while fostering a sense of team cohesiveness. Slack should never be the only place someone can weigh in on something like a design or prototype, but for quick gut checks, it’s perfect. It allows the team to talk with each other, no matter where in the world they are, and allows us to share early designs and prototypes quickly and efficiently. Different organizations tend to handle this in different ways, but from my experience, a team-specific Slack channel is invaluable. The first thing I do on any project is set up a team-only Slack channel. Set up a dedicated Slack channel for your team There are some great Slack hacks out there but now that I’ve had a lot of fun figuring out what works and doesn’t in Slack for digital project managers, I wanted to share the five most successful PM Slack Hacks I’ve found: 1. How it was something I could play around with, experiment with, and form into a critical part of my process. Slack is a tool for everyone, but I immediately saw how it could change my day to day work life. I think this is the reason I was so excited when Viget adopted Slack. Yes, there are always new PM tools coming out, but generally I can immediately tell when they are lacking something critical for our workflow, and even if it passes that test, I need the team to be on board with testing it which can be troublesome sometimes. Whether it’s a new prototyping tool for the visual design team, or a new sketching tool for our UX designers, or something like React, or Elixir for the development teams, it always seems like there’s something new and exciting to experiment with. Every team has new technologies and tools coming out that can dramatically change up their everyday workflow. Working as a Project Manager at a full-service digital agency can lead to some serious FOMO.
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