6 reasons why we need to automate Project Management on Slack

For all the PMs, Engineering Managers, and Team Leads out there who spend hours on team collaboration platforms, this one is for you.

Project Management as a discipline has been fundamentally streamlined over the past 2 decades. Each of your team members may have a task or story that they are assigned to. You probably have daily scrum to track progress and the team manager monitors what each person is accountable for. A tool like JIRA, Asana, or Trello might fit into your daily workflow.

These processes are tried and tested ways to keep the needle moving. However, we sometimes mistake process for progress. Managers get bogged down because project management is repetitive, tedious, and consumes all of our time. I’ve learned over the years that all successful managers do one thing really well. They know that they are being judged on their team’s ability to execute.

At the end of the day, you are valued for what you produce not how many meetings you set up.

The introduction of Slack helped reduce noise and improved my team’s overall workflow. Less meetings and emails meant more productivity. However, a platform like Slack has a lot more to offer and we wanted to tap into that potential by automating the most painful parts of project management.

Here is why we were motivated to do so and some of the questions we asked ourselves along the way while developing Fireflies.ai as a Slack Bot.

1) Your daily tasks aren’t inside project management tools

While Asana, JIRA, and Trello may have larger milestones and initiatives, they don’t include the operational and administrative tasks that you and your team spend most of your day tackling. It’s these tasks that come up regularly in Slack and that you throw on sticky notes at your desk. However, you focus most of your day on these and not the Epics and Stories in JIRA.

We asked ourselves:

What if my team had a personal assistant ( Fireflies.ai) that handled all the routine tasks that came up in our Slack workflow?

2) Accountability is hard to track

Knowing what each person is supposed to be doing takes a lot of unnecessary oversight. Transparent organizations and open team collaboration are the keys to doing well. Slack helps with transparency, but even it has limits.

We asked ourselves:

What if Fireflies tracked accountability and told me what each person was working on?

3) There are too many messages on Slack

As your team grows, there are multiple conversations happening in each channel at the same time. While Slack does a good job of curbing email overload, email conversations are now happening on Slack. There are threads that go back and forth between multiple stakeholders on the team.

We asked ourselves:

What if Fireflies knew what important actions occurred in each channel?

4) Key tasks originate in Slack but get lost

While we have project management tools to handle tasks, Slack is really the communication hub where my team’s tasks first pop up. However, due to the sheer volume of messaging, they disappear deep within the channel. The team forgets these tasks and has to set aside precious time everyday to retrace what important actions have to be completed.

We asked ourselves:

What if Fireflies could automatically extract key tasks from conversations?

5) We have meetings to plan what we plan on doing

Because these tasks get buried within Slack, a manager typically sets up a separate meeting to discuss and recreate those conversations that were happening in Slack. Your team may spend unnecessary time figuring out who needs to be doing what when all of that info was already buried within Slack. This redundancy is not the best use of a team’s time, which could have been better spent executing.

We asked ourselves:

What if Fireflies helped me auto-assign tasks to peers while having conversations in Slack?

6) Project Management Tools are not always up to date

Even when the team decides to update tools like Trello and Asana, this is rarely done the moment the task first comes up in discussions on Slack. Many managers tell me how much time they waste updating project management tools. Eventually the routine breaks down at some point and the team ends up having tasks scattered across docs and spreadsheets.

We asked ourselves:

What if Fireflies organized tasks that it auto-generated right within Slack for everyone on the team to view?

With that, I’d love to introduce our Slack Bot. It’s now officially on the Slack Directory and Fireflies.ai is ready for your team to try out.

Fireflies.ai will automatically extract actions from your conversations and create tasks for you and your teammates on Slack. It works in the background, applying NLP and ML to detect these tasks. Soon we’ll enable routing to workflows like GCal, Trello, Asana, Salesforce, and more

Krish Ramineni

Twitter: @krish_ramineni

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