Hi all,
Previous Notion-er now a Coda-er. Loving it.
We currently use WhatsApp as our company chat, which is LESS than ideal, given its minimal integrations.
What’s all of your recommendations? I’m not a huge fan of slack, it can get a bit confusing for some of our less tech savvy staff (hence why we use WhatsApp for its simplicity).
Thanks,
Danny
HI Danny,
Welcome to the coda forums!
What do you want to do with the functionality? is it just to do Instant messaging? The downside of something like slack, is it just speeds up your existing tools, leading to even greater overload, and a constant pinging.
One of the biggest problems in my existing project is an overload of email messages - I have 1500 unread mails from just the last 2 months.
From my perspective I am trying to reduce the need for communication by finding a way to bring topics to the fore, and having a central discussion place for them. None of these are easy - not so much because the technology is difficult, but because the people… and the company policies…
For specific issue resolution:
What I am currently doing at the office is that I have an “Issue Driver List” in Excel. IT IS NOT AN ISSUE LIST. The idea is that things that needs to be discussed with specific teams be recorded here, with the next step, and the person responsible for doing the next step. Once the issue has been resolved, the Final Answer is recorded, and saved for future reference. But I just had a case of somebody adding 4 emails to my existing 1000+, over the period of a month - needless to say, I never saw those. If it had been recorded in the driver list. I would have picked it up and answered. It was a simple question about whether a field should 100 or 1000…
I have also built a version in coda, which would work much better than Excel. It could also morph into a fully fledged requirements gathering tool.
The doc is here
A video explaining is here.
A video showing reporting is here
This is very much a tinker doc, to play around - turns out the company is not interested AT ALL. But one could also link it to e.g. Zoom to schedule discussions. Optionally via Google Calendar.
Another alternative would be a community building tool like Tribe. This will allow you to set up groups of people, and provide topics, around which discussions can take place. I have built a Coda Education Community here.
This is still very new - I have created Groups for beginners, medium level and advanced coda users. Posters can judge their topics, and decide which group to post in. People looking to learn, can then go to a specific Group based on their own experience level.
Posts can also be assigned a Topic. In this example I have created (so far) Collective Topics for buttons, formulas and tables.
But as I said up front, it depends what you want to achieve. It could be that after looking, you decide that Whatsapp is still the best.
As we have Microsoft Business package we are starting to implement Teams to replace WhatsApp, Vipers and other stuff people were using for official communications.
But we have different kind of problem, something that you might also run into, its really hard sometimes to change peoples behavior 
Lot of people still out of the habit, and some part also because are not familiar with Teams and don’t like “change”, are still using WhatsApp or Viber. It can be tiresome process to get all people to switch and enforce that way, but at the end it pays off. I guess 
It helps to have one centralized way of communicating, also removes need to send email for every little thing.
But there is the thing also @Piet_Strydom mentions, it can easily lead to information overload and constant pinging with tons of messages. I have read few books from people at Basecamp about how they work, mostly without almost any meetings and minimal real time communication, everything is asynchronous in written form, with people going directly to the “core” without lots of “empty” talk. Looks like really cool system, but it requires specific company culture and I guess its easier to implement in software development companies than in manufacturing ones like mine 
Amazing Piet, thanks for all the effort you put into this post. I’ve checked out Tribe and it looks great.
Hey Marko, great suggestion. We use the google suite so I considered switching to google chat, but as you say, it’s a culture thing!
HI Marko,
Could you recommend one of those books from Basecamp - I t sounds like I am re-inventing the wheel on our project.
Thank you very much
Piet
You can find all of them here: Books by Basecamp
Shape UP is the latest one (and its even free, you can read it online or DL in PDF) where their whole work process is explained. Interesting read definitely, although probably a bit more geard towards software companies (which is not strange since they are software company ).
Although I have listened on their podcast that even people in other areas managed to fully implement this system (I remember a guy from one manufacturing company, producing some complex equipment for factories, was talking how they implemented it in their processes).
In any case its an interesting read, not to long and simple to read and direct