A micro project is a piece of teamwork that takes no longer than a few days to complete. There are lots of tools to help you achieve that.

Instant messaging

These days teams are distributed. That can get in the way of communication which is fundamental to teamwork. We recommend using instant messaging, the lightweight cousin of email. There are lots to choose from: WhatsApp, Teams, Slack, etc. The important thing is that everyone involved has access, ideally they already have it on their phone or laptop. Signal or Telegram might be great for all sorts of reasons, but if you are not allowed to install it on your work PC and people don’t know how to use it, it is a non-starter.

Project management with Trello

Even micro-projects benefit from a project management tool, but let’s use a lightweight one that doesn’t need training, installation or licensing. We like Trello. Just go to trello.com, enter your new email, and you are ready to go. For a micro project the free account will almost certainly accommodate all your needs.

Stackoverflow

If you are writing code, you will end up on stackoverflow. It is where the world’s programmers go to ask questions and share answers. Don’t puzzle over an error for more than a minute, paste it into stackoverflow and see what others have said about it.

Github

Github is a free resource that should be the long-term memory for the code on your project. It protects against code getting lost or forgotten and it supports teams working together, especially when using branches.

Getting a domain

If your project is going to be visible outside of your team, getting a domain and putting a website on it is a quick and easy solution.

Domains names are hierarchical, so if you want to add a sub-domain to a higher-up domain, you need to ask the permission of the domain owner. For “public” domains such as .com or .org this happens automatically when you buy the domain but in corporate environments you need to find the owner. You can’t just create my_project.nhs.uk for example.

Public domains are easy to get for a few pounds, especially if you avoid the .com top level domain. These days there are over 1,500 TLDs to choose from. Getting a domain that you control give certainly helps with speed. It will also need that control if you want to receive email on that domain.

Website

Wordpress is often people’s first thought when it comes to putting up a website. Our advice is to avoid that and go for something simpler and cheaper instead. We use Jekyll which is free. You write the website in plain text, marked up with a simple syntax called markdown. That gets converted to HTML by Jekyll which also places it in a good looking visual template.

Building an email list with Mailchimp

If you can get people to your website then while they are there ask them to leave their email address. Mailchimp provides an easy to use tool which generates a form to drop into your website. You can see the new sign-ups in your Mailchimp account.