My work has more than 100 slack channels (I once asked if there was a place to see a list of all slack channels and was met with laughter. Apparently that isn’t something slack provides?) Whenever I need a question answered by a particular team I’ll post it to what seems like might be the most relevant channel. 99/100 they will direct me to a new channel I’ve never heard from. So I’ll join that channel and post my question. At this point I have about 80 channels spread across 5... whatever groups of channels are called in slack. Frankly it is overwhelming. It would be a full time job just trying to keep up with all the channels (I’d estimate there are 3000-10000 new messages everyday across all channels). I haven’t figured out anyway to know if something has been posted that would interest me under the deluge. On occasion I’ll be searching for something and discover that on a channel a very important announcement or policy change was made recently that I missed under the deluge. Anyway, I’ve given up. I’ve turned off notifications and don’t even open it up unless I have a question that needs answered. Then I start the arduous task of trying to figure out the right channel.
I work for a Fortune 100 company with thousands of IT people. I literally have no idea who I would talk to about this. Maybe there is a slack channel for that ;-)
I would start with your immediate boss and maybe his skip-level. For the skip-level come with a precise explanation of what Slack is doing well, what your experience with Slack seems to show for negative and some potential remedies :)
Well, one problem is that I don’t work for the IT department at my company. I’m not sure if my boss (or his boss or his boss’s boss) even knows what slack is.
