Case Study: IBM achieves streamlined end-to-end delivery and faster incident response with Slack

How the engineering team at ibm uses slack throughout the development lifecycle

IBM’s engineering organization, led by senior software engineer Thomas Lawless, faced the challenge of coordinating 40–50 people across development, CI, test automation, deployment and operations while constantly checking multiple tools each morning for code reviews, build statuses and system alerts. The fragmented workflow meant frequent context switching and manual handoffs that slowed delivery and made incident tracking cumbersome.

The team solved this by integrating Slack into their end-to-end delivery pipeline—using public team channels for PR and build notifications, deployment and batch-failure alerts, and a monitoring channel for NewRelic/Splunk/PagerDuty. Slack-driven incident channels create complete audit trails, enable faster reviews and on-the-spot collaboration (including shared channels with vendors), and have reduced extra steps and context switches, yielding measurable productivity gains and smoother deployments.

IBM

Thomas Lawless

Senior Software Engineer