Supercharge Your Upwork project

Over the years I have used Upwork and other freelancing websites to source talent on projects I needed help with.

Upwork's messaging system however, leaves a lot to be desired. Slack on the other hand, is a much more powerful collaboration tool, as it allows you to pull in a lot of data from different project management tools in one centralized location.

How I do it
For my company (B3DMultitech.com), I first created a workspace called B3DMultitech. Then, for each freelance project, I set up a unique Slack Channel.

This provides for me a compartmentalized space for all project communication between me and my developers. But more importantly, it also provides me a space to pull in notifications from other apps of which the developer and I use for collaboration.

In a typical software project, this could include a Kanban task organizational tool — such as Trello, and a code repository tool like Github. Fortunately, Slack has specialized integration apps for these platforms.

Below are the following Slack apps that really help aid our collaboration.

1. Github for Slack.
   This plugin posts all github notifications to the channel including code pushes, merges etc.
2. Trello for Slack
   To manage each project, I like to use Trello to implement a simple Kanban board, with the following columns: “To do”, “doing”, and “done”. This Slack app will post notifications from Trello to Slack when a new card is added / updates etc. in Trello. Since Slack is on my mobile, (and hopefully my developers mobile as well) we are quickly kept in the loop when important To do’s are created.
3. Zoom For Slack
   Of course, Zoom is a great addon for slack, as it allows you to quickly create a Zoom Meeting when chatting. Within the channel, you can simply type:
   /zoom to start a meeting
   /zoom meeting [topic] Start a meeting with topic
   /zoom join [meeting id/personal link name] Join a meeting using meeting ID/personal link name
   /zoom join me Join a meeting using your personal meeting ID
   /zoom call [@contact/phone number] Start a phone call with a contact or a phone.

Presto

Now whenever code is pushed to the repository, or a new task is added in Trello, our shared Chat Channel is notified.