Case Study: British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) achieves faster incident resolution and streamlined collaboration with Slack

Improving collaboration with Slack

The BBC, the world’s oldest national public broadcaster with more than 20,000 staff and a 3,000‑person design & engineering (D+E) group, faced collaboration challenges: legacy real‑time tools (telnet/IRC) and siloed workflows made it hard for non‑technical teams, mobile users and external partners to work together or integrate with critical systems like Jira and GitHub—a problem amplified during high‑stakes events such as the UHD trial at the 2018 FIFA World Cup.

D+E standardized on Slack, creating shared #operations and help channels, inviting partners via guest accounts and building custom bots and integrations (e.g., @chas for onboarding, @Devicebot for inventory, Confluence/GitHub links). The result was faster incident resolution, greater transparency, smoother partner coordination and overall higher efficiency in running the BBC’s digital services.

British Broadcasting Corporation