Chat Notifications

For most companies, internal communication tends to revolve more and more around a chat tool (such as Google Chat or Microsoft Team) for day-to-day updates and quick collaboration.

While this form of communication is rather informal, it still makes sense to rely on chat tools when managing a project. The ability to push notifications regarding the daily project management operation directly in a chat tool can be a great way to be kept up to date with ongoing projects.

What is the Sciforma Chat Notification feature?

Sciforma relies on webhook technology to send notifications to a given chat tool. A Webhook (also referred to as “web callback” or an “HTTP push API”) is based on an API (Application Programming Interface) and allows an application to provide other interfaces with real-time information.

As of today, we support notifications to Google Chat, Slack, and Microsoft Teams.

What kind of information should be shared?

The kind of information to push through notifications should be carefully selected to make sure that collaborators will not be inundated with a multitude of messages many of which are unwanted and/or irrelevant to their needs. In such occurrences, people tend to turn off the notifications or ignore them, which defeats the initial purpose of the feature.

Depending on the project type, the methodology used, and specific user permissions, the Project Manager might want to send different notifications to different chat rooms. For this reason, the Sciforma Chat Notifications feature allows for multiple Webhook links per project, each of which has specific dedicated events to trigger the notifications.

To whom should the information be shared?

In order to keep your communications relevant, the following should be considered when deciding who should receive notifications:

  • Relevant access to Sciforma – It can be very frustrating for users if they are notified about a specific object (like an Agile Backlog Item for instance) and are unable to have access to the related views in Sciforma.

  • Relevant level of information – People do not need to be directly involved in a  project to have an interest in some specific information. For instance, a PMO could be interested in only the Change Requests and the Risks, due to their potential impact.

  • Close collaborators – Whether they are from the same team or not, only people who work together on a given subject should receive the same notifications, in the same chat room. The Project Manager could, for instance, create a chat room for each Agile Team so that users from other teams do not receive notifications from an Iteration they are not working on. In addition, people who work together can interact in the feed created by the notifications!

  • People who log in the same language – Notifications are sent in the language the user selects when logging in. This is important to keep in mind for smooth communication!

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