Triage Playbook

When channels are very busy it’s easy for channel owners to unintentionally miss requests and questions. Slack adopted a method to triage incoming tasks to help increase visibility. With a couple minor tweaks to Slack’s playbook we have co-opted their approach across our slack workspace.

Channel Members

A few things we’re asking you to do.

• Indicate priority with emoji.

  :urgent: means the issue is URGENT.
  :help: means a question or request.
  ️ :fyi: means for your information or feedback.

• Include a brief description of your request after the emoji.

• Respond in thread to keep the channel clean.

Examples

I need help deploying a widget this afternoon, is anyone available to help?

I can’t access banno.com/a/blah and I have a demo in a few minutes. HALP!

️ I noticed a weird LinkedIn post about credit unions.

Channel Owners

• Assign and claim tasks with reactions that tell others what’s being worked on and by whom.

  👀 :eyes: means I’m looking at this for you.
  :ack: means Acknowledged, we’ve seen your message, but can’t look at it yet.
  🔄 :wip: aka :arrows-counterclockwise: means I’ve started working on the issue, but it could take a while.
  ✅ :done: aka :white_checkmark: means I’ve fixed the issue.

• Follow up in threads to keep the channel clean. Use the Also send to #channel sparingly.

You may have noticed most of these emoji already have “official” emoji names, however we think also having a contextualized alias is swell.