Why We Invite Our External Partners to Our Internal Slack

Slack was created to replace email hell. (I mean, it was created for a lot of other things but right now its highest adoption is for the purpose of replacing email hell.)

But even those organizations that have successfully killed email for internal communications still manage to jump back into the Great Email Chase (or did you send that by text message? Or did you leave it in a Jira comment? Where did we have that conversation?) when working with external partners and clients.

It can be tempting to be flexible and adapt to whichever communication style works for the client, but at Revelry we believe in our process, and we’re building companies and solutions that align with it.

“Clients are paying just as much for our process as they are for the code,” we sometimes say. So we invite clients and innovation partners into our communication flow.

Why do we intentionally invite clients to get all up in our business? Because they have asked us to get all up in theirs!

Many of our innovation partners get as excited about the process of working with us as they do about the results.

Here’s how that works:

We bring partners into our Slack communication

Slack provides a single, centralized place where all collaboration and project status flows.

Slack also offers a feature called Shared Channels to help with this, but that’s not how we do it.

We bring them in to our communication platform.

1. Invite

We utilize the Multi-Channel and Single Channel Guests function within Slack to invite collaboration partners to a specific channel. These guests do not have access to all of our internal conversations; only the single appropriate channel for their project or company.

2. Customize

We deploy the same process for each product we set out to build. The project gets its own Google Drive, GitHub repository (and corresponding Waffle board), and Slack channel. We invite the Revelers who will work on that project and the key stakeholders to the Drive, the repository, and the channel. As the Issue Board, Continuous Integration, and other appropriate tools are set up, we connect notification structures via Slack’s integration feature.

3. Create a Channel Topic

The channel topic is constantly visible at the top of the conversation pane, so this is where we place links to the most valuable project resources. Our project channels have the same format across the board. Here’s what everyone can see and have handy, via the Topic line, any time they are in the channel:

README: This is the backbone of the project. The README will include contact information, project brief, links to Google Drive and other resources, tech stack, and other crucial details.
WAFFLE: A link to the project’s Waffle board (this is a kanban application that lists GitHub Issues in a helpful, visual layout.)

4. Utilize Pinned Items

As project conversations progress, certain comments, links, or conversations always prove noteworthy. The InVision link to the wireframes, the link to the staging/demo site, and other handy channel comments help teammates quickly get to valuable documentation. Again, it’s still all available in the README, but hey — we’re living in an instant gratification sort of culture at this point, aren’t we?

5. Connect Integrations

We connect all of the software, bots, monitors, and databases that we use to launch and maintain software solutions to the Slack channel by integration. The integration bots automatically post to the channel when an action takes place in the build.

This helps us add as much transparency as we possibly can to the project.

6. Read through the noise

Sure, notifications and bots can muddle the conversation, but we remind each other and our innovation partners how to communicate amidst the noise.

Sometimes, we’re mid-conversation when the bots pop up. They’re automatically generated, so they can’t really be well-timed. If the conversation is happening synchronously, we trust that everyone will scan past the bots and review for the human responses. If the conversation is happening asynchronously, then we should use @mentions or threaded replies in order to make sure that comments aren’t lost in the noise.

But that doesn’t mean that all bot traffic is to be ignored. We link to it for a reason.

Yes, this means the partner has total access to the team.

“But, you let external contacts talk directly with your developers?” Yeah. We do. “But, how do you protect their time?” Well, at Revelry one of our Core Values is Earn and Dispense Trust. Trust is dispensed — and earned — in many ways.

One way is that we trust each teammate to block and protect their own time. When our teammates need a “heads-down” block of time, we trust that they’ll turn off notifications so that we can’t disturb them during work mode. And, we trust that they’ll provide an update and check for messages when that block of time reaches a stopping point.

Another way is that we trust our team to hold all conversations in the open and to report any inappropriate or ineffective conversations, should they occur.

Check out the original post for more tips on effective Slack communication

Originally published at revelry.co on October 23, 2017.