When you deal with enterprise content management and lead a team, it’s most often found everyone is remote. Even if your team is not remote the web publishing step is the last step in the launch process, and needless to say it’s pretty chaotic.

I’ve tried software in my time spent leading a 12 person remote team of which 3 were employees and 9 were contractors. I dealt with timezone issues, lack of visibility as to what the team was working on, and communication problems.

Here to share what works as far as tools.

Slack, Trello and Slope were the software I tried, and each has it’s own path in the web production world but they focus or are stronger at different things.

The communication tool you choose has to be thought through and you have to walk you team through how to use it, when to use it and what is expected of them.

Through the birage of quick texts and collaboration – at least what I found… I remember one day of working 14 hours and not setting up alerts on my phone to slack messages. I was heads down in code and re-opened slack to see a message from my manager’s boss. I was horrified I had not seen it sooner. It was known that we needed to be on slack but no one alerted the team they should login there 24/7. I was by my computer and phone all day yet the choice to send through a tool, no one overviewed was a mistep that many make.

Before you choose a tool think about how you expect the team to use it.

Here are some questions to ask yourself.

1. Will my team have company paid phones to get alerts by this tool?
2. Do I expect reply’s at all hours on this app?
3. What issues are urgent and should require phone calls only?
4. How do I manage what is uploaded to this system and privacy concerns.?
5. Who will have access and who will train new users on the tool?
6. What standards should we put in place – message format, area, categories of content etc..?

After you think through these questions document a summary of this for communication to your team.

Hold a meeting with them to show them the tool, do a user test week for the team to get used to the tool. Archive any old process and systems going forward.

Tools I like for web teams…

Slope
https://www.goslope.com

This tool has an awesome way to transform creative projects into manageable pieces, from it’s ability to annotate images and video that is collaborated on to it’s calendar view of deadlines and it’s ability to breakdown projects into manageable chunks. This tool is amazing and specifically geared for creative teams who work on images or multimedia.

Trello
https://trello.com/home

Trello is awesome for it’s kanban like setup. It’s easy to use and if you work in a waterfall approach it keeps track of the mountains of updates your team might be working on. You can customize the steps from say – Content Gathering, Writing, Graphics, Copyedit, Layout, Business Review and then Publishing, Localization, Translation, Archive.

Slack
https://slack.com/

What can I say about slack, but it’s great for building team camaraderie, users can emote gifs as to what they are feeling and especially with remote workers you have another level of contact and closeness with this tool. It’s a happy tool that works well if you are in the middle of going live with a launch on the site – and need to have everyone working off the same page of issues and get immediate notice they are working on them.