Slack has made IRC sexy again, and added an awesome mix of tools on top that really help out.

Tribal Knowledge

In our team channel, everyone gets an overview of what is going on, what our current sprint goal is, and any operational/critical issues in progress. Links to information are being scraped, bots are spamming errors in real time. Every discussion, the whole team is learning. The pinned messages are great.

We are also always dogfooding our software, so new employees asking for answers often lead to improvements in the interface to make things intuitive.

Automation Bots

Data aggregation: Our bots are monitoring production in real time and spamming errors, allowing our world-distributed team to have War Room discussions.
Focus on scrum: Bots spam lists of in-progress work and work to be verified, at regular intervals. During our meetings, the bots are used to pull ticket data to find out the state, create tickets, and update tickets.
We also have plugins to our third-party vendors to pull lists of rejected emails, bounces, failed login attempts, and all the other things we keep an eye on.

Client Communications

Again we are able to quickly set up War Room discussions, with teams including the client and other third parties. We are also able to leverage the bots to get updates, tickets, and other operational information that could impact systems. Real-time updates as problems are created and destroyed.

Generation Z

GenZ wants to txt msg or talk with Siri. The autobot work we have done so far lays the foundation for being able to support our clients.

Didn't understand a word this article said?

No problem, neither did our content team. That's Bernie Lees, CTO of Spartan Spark. He's the genius behind Spartan One - the algorithm that meshes with Google, that gets our clients to Page 1 on the search engines ;)