Slack has become a great productivity tool for teams working remotely. It is a virtual office that has stood the test of time and competition such as Microsoft Teams. It has enabled individuals to work from home and remain organized and focused on tasks regardless of their physical locations.
Further, Slack has spiced up communication within many organizations by providing a platform for quick communication thus eliminating unnecessary emails. That notwithstanding, there is still an aspect of Slack that most people and organizations have not yet made full use of which is project management.
Slack offers an unending stream of features allowing you to customize it according to your project management needs. Now that you know that you have a tool that you are under-utilizing let us look at some ways you can turn Slack into your project management tool.
Use Channels as Projects
Channels are message streams that everyone in the team can access. To ensure that your projects remain organized, create a channel for every project. Since you are at liberty to create as many channels as you wish, you may end up having so many of them, and to ensure that you keep the number within the manageable range, create channels for just the main projects.
Turn your conversation into a To-Do list
In your conversation with your project team members within a project channel, you may spot some tasks that you need to do. You do not have to write a to-do list in your notebook, just star those messages within the channel and these messages will appear on a separate list of starred items. This list now becomes your to-do list. Once you have completed a task on your ‘to-do’ list, just un-star the message and it will disappear from the list.
Use the Slackbot to take notes quickly
Slackbot is a built-in robot in Slack that enables you to write down notes quickly and randomly by just sending a direct message to ‘Slackbot.’ In addition, if you create a private group but skip the option of inviting people, you will have created another platform where you can write down your quick notes.
Use the ‘Create Snippet’ feature to create templates
Slack offers the option of creating and storing templates of documents that you frequently use. On the free version of Slack, you can store documents of up to 5 GBs. With this feature, you do not have to create documents that you need on a regular basis from scratch every time you need them.
Create Reminders/Notifications
Slack has the slash command that reminds you the tasks that are likely to escape your mind. It uses the syntax:
/remind {who}{what}{when}
For instance, if you want it to remind you to update your work plan the command will be as follows:
/remind me to update my work plan every day
This seems like another programming task, don’t worry though, the slackbot will always present a sample or two of the commands once you get it wrong.
If you want to bring your own tools that you have already invested heavily on, Slack has seamless integrations with tools such a Trello. If your tool is not integrated with Slack, you have the option of coding your own integration. That’s one area that Slack beats MS Teams. If you are not sure where to start and you need a custom tool, get in touch with me.
This is just but a snippet of the features that Slack brings to project managers, try it out.