I have a question for you: How many different services do you use while working on a game development project? If you’re like most people you might have quite a few. There are so many tools today to help us get our projects out on time and within scope. And as much as they help, they can make us a less efficient and less streamlined.
Usually, everyone on a team has their own preferred way of working. Some people like doing checklists through email, while others are all into Trello. And even others are off the grid that they keep their progress to themselves unless you hound them. It’s just too much. Running a team should not be that complicated.
I was happy when I came across this service that acts as a hub for many of the services I was working with already. Imagine creating, updating, and completing tasks in Asana without having to go to asana.com. Imagine sending a quick update out to your team using the same input box. Or maybe you need to get feedback on a decision that needs to be made. Sounds pretty sweet right? Too good to be true. Not at all. Slack is how I condensed my channels of communications into just one place.
Give me some Slack could you?
What is slack anyway? Slack is a hub for your team communication. It’s a way to take your team from communicating from email, SMS, MMS, chat services and put them all in one place. And that isn’t all. Continue to share documents regularly through Google Drive or Dropbox. You can see them all in the same place. Slack has a great video on how it changed one team’s workflow.
How many integrated services do they have again?
Here is just a taste of some of the integrations you can use with slack. There are many more and if you are daring or if you have someone who has developed websites previously you can make custom web hooks with other services in order to use other APIs (Now THAT is power).
With the power of combining all of your communication into one hub, I can tell you from experience is invaluable. Even for a small team of two or three people I would recommend using. I have use it by myself since it allows me to see all my services in one place.
If you’re like me, you like to have control but more importantly you know that you cannot waste any time going and checking on each of your services. You can use Slack through a web browser or on your phone. It notifies you when you have updates. You can communicate to your team as a whole or you can message team members individually. The really question is why aren’t you using this? Do you like being spread thin with your project? I didn’t think so.
Slack is easy to set up. Less than 5 minutes to get started with your team. Depending on how many services you want to integrate with will determine how much time you will need after that. There is a very small learning curve and they even have a bot to help you get started! Head over to Slack’s Website and your team on the right track and stop messing around. You’ll thank me later.
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Note From The Guest Author:
Slack does have a lot of integrations and depending on your team you most likely won’t need all of them. If there’s enough interest in slack from the community I will do follow up articles on setting up and using some of the common integrations (or if there’s a popular requested integration).
Comment below or stalk me on Twitter — @gioducci1!
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