At Fishtank, we utilize a variety of tools for managing and executing Sitecore projects. Each tool has its own unique purpose and advantages. This document provides an overview of our general tools that are used daily, rather than an exhaustive list of all tools used within the company.
People often mistakenly assume that Microsoft DevOps is only a tool for developers. However, it is actually an incredible project management tool that can be compared to popular agile project management tools such as Jira.
DevOps includes the following out of the box functions:
Boards is where the real meat and potatoes exists for project management. It includes backlog as well as sprint management.
You can add extensions to your DevOps instance to enhance the out-of-the-box functionality or include additional functionality. For example, we have added an extension for performing sprint retrospectives.
Slack is a popular communication tool. In this document, we will focus on how to use it effectively rather than what it is. For remote teams, consistent communication among team members is essential. To facilitate this, each project has its dedicated Slack channel within the workspace. Below are some tips and tricks to help you make the most of Slack.
We use Harvest for two main purposes: time entry and invoicing. Additionally, it can be utilized for resource forecasting. While most organizations have some form of time tracking tool, Harvest's main advantage lies in its seamless integration with other tools that we use.
It has slack integration where using the back slash command we can add time to Harvest.
Within DevOps you can log time against a user story within a Billing tab.
Both prevent you from having to separately log in to Harvest to log time.
Notion is incredible. We used it for a lot of different things but at the highest level it’s an incredibly powerful wiki.
Notion describes themselves as “Notion is a single space where you can think, write, and plan. Capture thoughts, manage projects, or even run an entire company — and do it exactly the way you want.”
It terms of projects we used it as a Dashboard for each one of our projects. It provides links and information anyone would need to access related to the project.
This blog for example was written in Notion and then copied to Sitecore and published to the site.
Notion also includes amazing AI tools to help make you sound better when writing content, summarizing meetings notes, creating agenda’s or structure data.
BambooHR as you can infer is an HR management tool. We use for managing the lifecycle of a person’s journey with Fishtank.
As it pertains to projects a project manager can request feedback from others about an individual on a project. It will ask this person to answer two questions:
This feedback is anonymous but can be shared with the individual by the manager within a one on one or performance assessment.
We have fully embraced this new generation of actually valuable AI tools. Instead of fearing them, we use them to deliver faster and better results for our clients. Currently, we are utilizing these AI tools to perform or optimize certain tasks, such as:
This represents a subset of what we have used AI for. Here are some of the day to day tools we use to perform these tasks:
I described above how we use Notion. Notion also provides built in AI functionality. To be able to enhance the information already in Notion without having to copy and paste this information into ChatGPT or another tools is really great.
Notion AI | Work faster. Write better. Think bigger.
The OG, the GOAT. We use the paid version which guarantees access during peak performance times, provides faster performance and gives you early access to newer features.
GitHub Copilot is a cloud-based artificial intelligence tool developed by GitHub and OpenAI. It assists users of Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, Neovim, and JetBrains integrated development environments by autocompleting code.
We spend a lot of time in Visual Studio writing code. Our developers have access to purchase and utilize Copilot.
As they write code Copilot will suggest or auto-complete the remaining lines of code which can be accepted and modified as need be. It can significantly increase the efficiency of writing code.
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