Assemble a Delivery Team

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Assemble your delivery team.
  
• Define roles for you, the client, and Slack.
  
• Deliver a roles and responsibilities document, and map it to key sessions.
  

Build a Team

The successful delivery of a Slack services engagement requires participation and support from all parties involved. All engagements have a diverse set of activities and deliverables, so our recommendation is to build a comprehensive view of roles and responsibilities as a part of project planning.

Define Roles Within the Delivery Team

The delivery team is comprised of individuals from:

• Your project team
  
• The client’s team
  
• The Slack team
  

Your Project Team

Your team drives the services engagement. And as a general rule, your team provides overviews, recommendations, and best practices to the client. Use the SOW to review the different roles outlined and the deliverables and phases owned by the team members.

Important!

Your team should never gain access to configure or make changes in the client’s Slack instance, unless otherwise stated in the SOW.

Responsibilities by Workstream

Slack’s Services team maps its roles closely to the four workstreams of a Slack project as outlined here. How you and your consulting team decide to assign responsibilities is dependent on how you organize roles within your organization.

Consider a few suggestions for outlining roles and responsibilities for your internal project team.

• Ensure that each team member is Slack Certified, so that they have a deep understanding of the deliverables and key activities they’re responsible for.
  
• Create a separate project channel in Slack for your consulting team where they can share updates on their project work that isn’t client facing.
  
• Prompt your team members to post client-facing updates in the shared Slack Connect channel using a regular status update workflow.
  

Once you internally establish roles and align on responsibilities, you can then expand roles and responsibilities to include Slack and your client team.

The Client’s Team

The client owns making decisions and incorporating those decisions into the configuration of Slack prior to the launch.

The client is expected to come into the engagement with a fully staffed team allocated to this project and beyond. It’s recommended that project team structure is discussed with the client as a part of the pre-sales motion and the SOW. If not, use your time in project planning to help your client assemble their team.

The client is responsible for making organization-specific decisions throughout the project and making all configurations in their Slack instance. In addition, they should manage all change management and communication back to their organization’s user base.

Consider these core roles from the client's team.

Pro Tip

In addition to the core roles above, you might also consider designating IT or development team members and subject matter experts (SMEs) based on the client’s business units that Slack is being deployed to.

The Slack Team

Your services sit within your client’s broader journey with Slack. So it’s important to understand who you can involve and contact for assistance. Similar to how you mapped out roles and responsibilities for your internal team, plan to do the same with the Slack contacts for your client’s account.

Consider these Slack Account and Support team members.

• Slack account executive (AE): The Slack AE sells Slack licenses. There’s an AE associated with your client’s account. A Slack AE might reach out to you during their sales cycle if you have industry expertise, software expertise, existing client relationships, or local offices to help meet the needs of a specific account.
  
• Slack customer success manager (CSM): The Slack CSM drives the overall success plan for the account. They think about how Slack can continue to drive value for the account as they mature. While your services focus on supporting your client with time-bound deliverables, the CSM works with the account over their lifespan with Slack.
  

Collaborate with these Slack team members to consider how your engagement impacts the overall success plan for the account. It’s best practice to consult these roles to determine how much they would like to be aware of progress and included in the engagement. There might be sales targets, account expansion, and other key efforts planned out by the account team that you should be aware of.

To best collaborate with Slack’s account team, it’s recommended that you:

1. Invite key Slack members to your project channel with the client for assistance.
   
2. Document Slack processes for which your project team will require support from Slack. Some key processes include:
   
   • Viewing open Zendesk help tickets sent by the customer to Slack’s Customer Experience team.
     
   • Requesting and pulling data audits for your client such as channel audits, workspace audits, app audits, and pre-migration reports.
     
   • Scheduling migrations and viewing migration progress.
     

Mapping Roles to the Project

Take what you gather in assembling the team and aligning on roles and responsibilities to create a RACI chart that can be used throughout the project.

• Responsible (at least one person per task): Does the work to complete the task.
  
• Accountable (limit to one person per task): Delegates work to others and reviews the task or deliverable before it's approved as complete.
  
• Consulted (no maximum or minimum): Provides input based on their area of expertise or the impact to their work.
  
• Informed (no maximum or minimum): Needs to be kept in the loop, but not included in the details of every deliverable.
  

Here’s an example RACI chart that outlines roles and responsibilities by workstream.

Recap

Now you know about Slack project planning, from designing a Statement of Work, all the way to assembling a highly effective delivery team—and even how to deliver Slack with… (checks notes)... Slack itself.