How do you handle travelling between devices though? I find it virtually impossible to function on IRC with the gaps in between from when I'm offline, but still haven't found a workable way to keep a persistent session going across devices (work, home, mobile.)
There is no better way to coordinate. Clients for every platform are available. You can have new tickets, bugs, announcements piped into the channel. Discuss everything instantly and in real time, while leaving a log for those who are offline, highlighting them when necessary.
Running your own server is perfectly feasible. And if you connect to a known ircd with SSL forced, it's reasonably secure. There are even OTR plugins for many popular clients (♥irssi♥). There's also FiSH but that's on the inconvenient end of the paranoid spectrum.
It is perfect if people you're going to communicate with are proficient computer users.