Organizing your project work on Slack
StartUpOfTheMonth: Pingpad helps you focus on what matters
TL;DR
Pingpad has built a project management tool in Slack by adding Pingpad boards, which offer Trello like experience for organizing projects. Here’s a quick peek:
I know what you’re thinking, “that resembles my Trello board”
Here’s how Pingpad, a Slack + Trello + Google docs tool helps you keep your information in order.
Empowering the growing class of people who stretch Slack
Every Slack channel has a purpose and personality. Some are for projects, others for teams, and still others focus on specific topics.
With well over 900 apps in Slack’s App Directory, you can connect Slack with tools that compliment your requirements to get the job done. Slack is a great tool for communication but let’s face it — getting everyone on the same page, and the team in rhythm to manage a task requires constant meetings and calls which only makes confusion to compound, leading to inefficiency.
By turning it into an ingenious tool
Toyota, as a way of maintaining operational flexibility while keeping production levels high across its factories, developed the Kanban system to manage and follow up on tasks. The core feature of Trello are the project boards built on Kanban system showing exactly how a project is shaping up. It’s a tool so flexible that you can use it for development, QA, customer ideas, marketing projects, raising investment, etc.
How it works
The real beauty of Trello and the Kanban system lies in its versatility.
All project board contain cards which are viewed in a vertical list, with each card representing sequential activity that needs to be carried out in relation to a particular project. The cards sit within the context of a specific board and users are able to add comments, upload file attachments, create checklists and add labels or due dates to centralise the key information.
Organizing conversations, keeping communication transparent, and creating a searchable archive that anyone on your team can refer
The Pingpad update on Slack brings a new organizational layer through Pingpad boards, which offers a Trello-like experience for organizing projects by content type such as open items, completed tasks and shared documents.
With some differences:
- All Slack channels automatically get a Pingpad Board with no new logins required
- Pingpad “Notes” have a full collaborative WYSIWYG editor, so people can work together in the same document at the same time, like Google Docs
- Pingpad is designed Slack-first, focused on making life in Slack better
Switching from the conversational UI
But the way we use Slack has completely shifted. We aren’t trying to digitize physical analogs any more; we’re using documents as tools to run our teams.
So while the board is separate from Slack, the work on the board is fully integrated in Slack via Pingpad Conversations.
That means if you share a note created in Slack, the Pingpad bot will recognize it as a note and allow you to see more information about it, while teeing up next actions such as providing feedback or even closing the item when it’s completed.
Pingpad Boards are designed to “sit alongside” Slack Channels to help teams visualize what “on the same page” looks like for a channel and lay out a channel’s workflow rhythm, fully accessible on Slack.
Not all new platforms will stand the test of time and prove themselves as genuinely useful business tools but Pingpad is remarkably clear and easy to follow which makes it worth investigating if you haven’t already.
Whether you choose to use it for internal purposes or for client work, it is an excellent management tool. It is intuitive, and very simple. We urge you to try it out for yourself.
Pingpad is a startup working out of Investopad’s Gurgaon Studios. We encourgage innovation amongst all our inhouse startups and that is what Pingpad is bringing to the table!
