Speed up your processes with good Slack Notifications

Slack makes a powerful tool for eliminating communication bottlenecks. Here are a few practical examples from our experience:

This is one obvious application for working with applications like https://interfaceware.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/EC/pages/2698018820 and https://interfaceware.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/EC/pages/2697691227.

Most companies need certain things to happen with for onboarding new clients. Slack can be a very helpful tool in prompting people towards key actions in your process.

See https://interfaceware.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/IXB/pages/2640511082 to see how we use Slack to give real time notifications anytime a crash happens with Iguana anywhere in the world.

See our https://interfaceware.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/EC/pages/2672853001. In our company if you push a commit which breaks the build of IguanaX, within minutes you are going to be notified by Slack that there is a problem.

Some key ideas to use Slack effectively:

See https://interfaceware.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/EC/pages/2105704467. It’s easy to get carried away with notifications and make them too noisy and chatty. If something is everyone’s responsibility then it is no one’s responsibility.

Staff will swiftly ignore notifications which are always bleeping for no good reason.

This is really big - you only do it there is a specific action required by someone. If it’s just a general up date then it’s better for it to go into a general slack channel. This is how we do it with our https://interfaceware.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/EC/pages/2672853001:

If a developer gets tagged (see https://interfaceware.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/IXB/pages/2698871004) if and only if they broke the build - i.e. there is a real action for them to perform.

In the case of the https://interfaceware.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/EC/pages/2672853001 we have links for the following systems:

Our Git source code commits (in Bitbucket)
The logs from the build
At one point we also had links to Jira our project management system (should do that again!)

One can do the same with most web applications with products like https://interfaceware.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/EC/pages/2698018820, https://interfaceware.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/EC/pages/2697691227 and Xero etc.

Try making one change at time, get feedback. Iterate, rinse and repeat. Learn.