A Beginner’s Guide to Designing a Project Channel Structure in Slack 🐥
This is a good guide for the teams new to Slack who are looking to set up a channel structure for the first time. It could provide a step-by-step guide on how to create channels, how to organize them, and so on…
Why designing the project channel structure is Important? 🎨
- 📒 Designing the project channel structure in Slack is important because it helps to keep communication organized and focused.
- 📒 By creating separate channels for different topics or project teams, members can easily find and join the conversations that are relevant to them, reducing the amount of clutter and noise in the main channel.
- 📒 This can also make it easier for team members to collaborate and stay informed about important updates and progress on a project.
- 📒 Additionally, a well-designed channel structure can also help to improve the overall efficiency and productivity of the team.
Let us assume an organization wanted a channel for each milestone 🪜 for its new project, but we also had other work happening in between, such as creating marketing collateral, managing contracts, resolving technical issues, and more. So they can decide to have a project channel structure that included channels dedicated to each workstream.
To keep project channels organized, descriptive, and easy to navigate, the organization can use consistent channel names, channel prefixes, and channel keywords.
For example: #proj-project_name-project_keywords 🦹♂️
#proj-waterworks-
#proj-waterworks-website
#proj-waterworks-website-design
#proj-waterworks-website-engineering
#proj-waterworks-fundraiser
#proj-waterworks-fundraiser-legal
#proj-waterworks-fundraiser-marketing
This made it easy to search for whatever or whomever the organization needed quickly in Slack, and immediately gives them a sense of what was being worked on in the channel.
Slack Connect for external organizations 🕷️
As an organization partners with so many other organizations, decides to keep things tidy by centralizing all of our work and communications with them in Slack. Many of them did not have Slack yet, so you can get them started by inviting them to some of your channels using Slack Connect 🚀
Since you have to manage channels restricted 🍭 to our internal teams along with channels shared with other organizations, we used channel prefixes to indicate what was being shared externally.
For example, to help us know if a channel was being shared with our partner, Big Corp, we used the following channel naming convention:
#ext-project_name-partner_name
#ext-waterworks-bigcorp
Add more specific channels as you grow 💹
Assuming your project channel structure helped build a foundation for you in Slack. So, you started with broad channels and added more specific ones over time, without disrupting how people worked.
Over time, you can also add channels dedicated to specific events, locations and times: #proj-project_name-project_keywords
Example:
#proj-waterworks-conference-
#proj-waterworks-conference-nationalgeo-lasvegas-2022
#proj-waterworks-conference-conservationheroes-miami-2023
Summary 🔄
- The article provides a guide for teams new to Slack on how to design an effective project channel structure to keep communication organized and focused.
- It suggests using consistent channel names, prefixes and keywords, and also using Slack Connect for external organizations.
- Additionally, as the organization and projects grow, more specific channels can be added over time.
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