The last few months have proven to me(again) how much I dislike Skype as a communication medium. It is great for voice but I truly despise, ok wait, hate it as an instant messaging platform. I have a lot of respect for what it can do in terms of voice, video and screen sharing, but I simply hate it. I stopped using it years ago due to it’s intrusive nature, but recently needed to install it to communicate with a UK based client and since then things have spiralled out of control and now I have clients contacting me on it on an almost daily basis.

The problem I have with this(realtime) approach is that I can’t triage client communications. I seriously get tons of correspondence. At any given point in time we’re working on easily 10 or more projects of different sizes and complexity, all involving; client engagement, planning, development, internal review, client side review, refinement and implementation. I need to be able to provide attention to the important correspondence first to ensure the best possible service to our clients. IM gets in the way of this.

I have found that clients(super generalisation) who make use of IM as a medium to report bugs or provide feedback on testing often send through information without any logical structure and don’t take the time to think of the impact of what they’re doing. They just hit send, because it’s easy and they’re used to the conversational nature IM. This results in numerous hours of wasted time, as IMs often deviant of topic. It’s also difficult to track as the correspondence is sitting inside of a separate app, outside of our business process and business tools.

Since engaging with you on the topic of realtime availability and the abuse thereof, I have spent some more time thinking about it. I definitely agree that there is more to it, than availability alone, resulting in the abuse. We need to set clear guidelines and expectations in terms of what is expected and how people should engage with us.

Internally our team is Google based. This means our whole team has Gmail open, all day, every day. The benefit of this for us is, we use Email for client communications and Hangouts as our primary form of internal communications. We apply filters and labels to email and leverage priority inbox to manage the follow and priority of mail.

We have tried numerous tools for managing tasks, productivity and all those lovely things people keep building apps for. What we’ve found works the best(for us) is keeping it simple and using less apps instead of more.

Due to the nature of our work, software development, we have one requirement which other businesses do not have and that is source version control.

We use BitBucket and GitHub for this. We leverage the built in issue tracking functions to manage our task lists, contextually for each client and project. Any questions or comments relating to a task are logged on the task. This way we only ever have one version of the truth. Everyone can see what is being discussed and contribute in the open. Depending on our clients needs and the duration of the project we also add them to the repository and engage with them directly within the issue tracker.

The resulting impact for us is that, all communication relating to specific tasks is in black and white, logged with the task, so if we hire new team members or need to work with external resources, it’s very easy for us to bring someone up to speed. It’s also super easy to go back to a bug report or feature request from a year back and see what was implemented and why.

There are some clear advantages of Slack, especially for businesses that don’t run Google Apps or other toolsets with integrated IM. Another great advantage over Skype is that Slack does not require you to download and install an app to use it on your laptop or desktop, you can just log in. This suits me much better. Another reason, why I like hangouts inside of Gmail.

I see WordPress have recently switched to Slack, I think this is great. I have recommended the Ghost dev team move public discussion to Slack as well. I think Slack has a great UI and overall I like what they have done with the product.

Our team is distributed with two in one office, two in another and two working remotely from home, without group chats or one on one IM discussions our business would not be able to cope.