This article was brought to you by Usersnap – a visual bug tracking and user feedback solution for every web project.
Recently we’ve presented our favorite chat tools and the basics of project communication.
This time we’d like to take the next step and show you how to get more out of your team communication. Simply by integrating your favorite chat messenger with your project management software.
Whether you’re a freelancer or you’re working in a department of a larger company, you probably feel that emails are everywhere and that they are killing your time. Well, I guess you’re not alone.
As we mentioned before, it isn’t that bad to use email – however, there are much better solutions on the market in order to keep everyone up-to-date in a web project. Lately, a lot of easy-to-use chat tools packed with some awesome features emerged. No matter if they are called Slack, Hall or Hipchat. The next generation of Skype and email is here. Also, you can create special QR codes to give your employees more information about chat tools. When it comes to generating QR codes, you can use some of the best QR code generators.
All these tools share the same passion for keeping things simple and lean. Whether it’s about texting with colleagues or discussing project requirements and design drafts. The coordination takes place in one of these awesome chat messengers. And that’s good.
So what’s my first advice? Check out which chat tool fits best for your business communication and get your colleagues (and clients (to some extent)) on board. Check out our recent blogpost about the basics of project communication.
Besides well-known software, like JIRA, more and more really awesome project management tools – Asana, Basecamp, Trello just to name a few – fight for your attention. There’s no real answer to the perfect project management tool since requirements differ from team to team. From task management to milestone planning to Kanban boards, to project analytics & monitoring. Many of the mentioned project management tools offer these features. Just check out one of these awesome tools and test it if it fits into your business case.
Are you already using one of those project management tools for managing your web projects and not sure if they integrate with your chat software? Check out our collection of well-known project management tools and their integration pages:
Communicating with colleagues and clients inside your chat tool and managing all your tasks, milestones and deliverables inside your project management software? On paper, this sounds fine. De facto working with a chat- and project management software can become quite chaotic and inefficient.
Having two tools side-by-side can be time-consuming. By integrating the chat tool (like Slack) with the project management tool you avoid inefficient workflows and duplicate or missing content.
The good news is that you can get more out of your tools by integrating them deeper in your web development workflow. As mentioned above most of the project management & chat tools offer integration possibilities.
By adding your agile project management software to your chat messenger, you’ll get notified every time an important event happens.
For example, if the project manager in charge adds a new task for a certain project in your project management tool and assigns it to you, you’ll be notified directly in your chat tool. Or if a support agent discovers a critical bug on your website and adds that bug to your PM tool, you’ll also get an immediate notification in your chat tool of your choice.
Let’s take the example of the chat software Hall and connect it with the project management tool Asana. Both are two awesome tools which can be simply integrated. (This is just an example – for all the other tools the process is quite similar.)
1. Log in to your chat tool (in this case Hall.com):
2. And switch to the chat settings. There you’ll find all available integration possibilities:
If your project management tool is not listed among the integrations, you can probably make use of incoming webhooks for connecting your web-based project management tool to your chat messenger. This option is available at all major chat tools.
3. Add your project management tool (in this case Asana) by entering your login data.
4. Start receiving notification to your chat messenger from your project management tool:
Et voila, you’ll receive notification from your project management tool. Being notified when…
…someone created a new task
…assigned you a task
…closed a task
…can be a real time saver for your project managers, developers, and designers.
Of course, you should avoid an infobesity by getting unnecessary notifications to your chat inbox. Turn off general notifications for any kind of activity. We recommend enabling notifications only for certain keywords or mentions.
By implementing your chat messenger with your project management tool the overall development workflow can be made more flexible and faster with real-time interactions.
Chat messengers not only offer integrations for general project management solutions, but also for certain niches in web development such as testing and bug reporting. Integrating a bug tracker or feedback tool with your chat messenger can bring your web development to a whole new level. Not only having your project management tool connect to your chat messenger, but also your issue- or bug tracker can be a huge time saver in your quality assurance process.
By integrating the bug tracker from Usersnap with – let’s say – Slack or Hall, your web developers can be notified immediately inside Slack/Hall every time your customer reports a new (critical) bug.
Getting the right information, at the right time from the right person. What sounds simple in theory, isn’t that easy if you’re dealing with a fair bit of different projects, clients, teams, applications, and tools. By implementing your chat messenger with your existing project management tool, the overall development workflow will be made more interactive. The establishment of a communication workflow with integrations of your used project management tools will ensure that every project is on track, deliverables aren’t overlooked, customer feedback isn’t forgotten about and your team members are up-to-date with the needed information.
This article was brought to you by Usersnap – a visual bug tracking and screenshot tool for every web project.
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