Remote Team Interactions Workbook

In the new remote-first and hybrid workplace, many organizations are struggling to catch up with new tooling and ways of working. Many are discovering for the first time that the physical office was covering up poorly defined teams and poorly defined areas of focus, threatening their DevOps transformation efforts and the overall health and success of their business. Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, coauthors of the highly successful Team Topologies, provide proven patterns for a successful remote-first approach to teams. Using simple tools for dependency tracking and patterns from Team Topologies, such as the Team API, organizations will find that well-defined team interactions are key to effective IT delivery in the remote-first world. This workbook explores several aspects of team-first remote work, including: •How the new “remote-first” world is highlighting existing poor team interactions within organizations. •Why organizations should use the Team API pattern to define and communicate the focus of teams. •How organizations can track and remove team-level dependencies. •How and why organizations should design inter-team communications consciously. •How and why organizations can use the three team interaction modes from Team Topologies (collaboration, x-as-a-service, and facilitating) to help. The ideas and patterns presented here will help your organization become more effective with a team-based, remote-first approach to building and running software systems.

Effective software teams are essential for any organization to deliver value continuously and sustainably. But how do you build the best team organization for your specific goals, culture, and needs? Team Topologies is a practical, step-by-step, adaptive model for organizational design and team interaction based on four fundamental team types and three team interaction patterns. It is a model that treats teams as the fundamental means of delivery, where team structures and communication pathways are able to evolve with technological and organizational maturity. In Team Topologies, IT consultants Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais share secrets of successful team patterns and interactions to help readers choose and evolve the right team patterns for their organization, making sure to keep the software healthy and optimize value streams. Team Topologies is a major step forward in organizational design for software, presenting a well-defined way for teams to interact and interrelate that helps make the resulting software architecture clearer and more sustainable, turning inter-team problems into valuable signals for the self-steering organization.

This book is for leaders committed to building a great remote team culture, but who don't have time or know where to start. Whether you're new to remote work or have been working remotely for years, there's enough on your plate already without thinking about how to connect with and engage your team. I wrote this book to do just that and take one thing off your to-do list.The book is intentionally short: low on reading and high on actions.It's organized in such a way that you can open it five minutes before your meeting to grab a quick game or sit down to plan a longer virtual team retreat. In the first few pages you will find a Quick Reference Guide to help you find exactly what you need.You will have access to 75+ activity ideas and hundreds of questions to help make your remote meetings, one on ones, and day-to-day virtual interactions more engaging.Beyond games, you will find team reflection activities, stay conversation questions, a unique end of the year team celebration idea, and more. You will also find simple ways to virtually learn, stay healthy, and celebrate together as a team.The only thing you need to do is take action.Free BonusesWhen you purchase this book, you will gain access to copies of the following free handouts and downloads:75+ Team Building Activities Quick Reference GuideA printable quick reference of the book to keep on your desk with reminders of key concepts, sample meeting agendas, and more.Know Your People FormA form to track all the information you should know about your people.COVID-19 ResourcesQuestions to help you understand what your people are facing each day, a list of five things that should be on every virtual meeting agenda, and tips to help your team consciously transition back to work when the time comes.One Year Subscription to the Beyond Thank You Remote Team "Nudge"When you download the free bonus, you will have the opportunity to sign up for the Beyond Thank You Remote Team "Nudge." Every two weeks, I will send out activities, meeting prompts, and other ideas from this book directly to your email - a little nudge to remind you to take action. If these are unhelpful, you can unsubscribe any time.

Information Technology time management expert Dominica DeGrandis, the reveals the real crime of the century--time theft, one of the most costly factors impacting enterprises in their day-to-day operations. The solution to preventing these value stream delays? Make the work visible. In this timely book (title not final), solutions and preventative measures are illustrated and methodologies outlined for immediate application into daily work.

LONGLISTED FOR THE FINANCIAL TIMES & MCKINSEY BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR “I often talk about the importance of trust when it comes to work: the trust of your employees and building trust with your customers. This book provides a blueprint for how to build and maintain that trust and connection in a digital environment.” —Eric S. Yuan, founder and CEO of Zoom A Harvard Business School professor and leading expert in virtual and global work provides remote workers and leaders with the best practices necessary to perform at the highest levels in their organizations. The rapid and unprecedented changes brought on by Covid-19 have accelerated the transition to remote working, requiring the wholesale migration of nearly entire companies to virtual work in just weeks, leaving managers and employees scrambling to adjust. This massive transition has forced companies to rapidly advance their digital footprint, using cloud, storage, cybersecurity, and device tools to accommodate their new remote workforce. Experiencing the benefits of remote working—including nonexistent commute times, lower operational costs, and a larger pool of global job applicants—many companies, including Twitter and Google, plan to permanently incorporate remote days or give employees the option to work from home full-time. But virtual work has it challenges. Employees feel lost, isolated, out of sync, and out of sight. They want to know how to build trust, maintain connections without in-person interactions, and a proper work/life balance. Managers want to know how to lead virtually, how to keep their teams motivated, what digital tools they’ll need, and how to keep employees productive. Providing compelling, evidence-based answers to these and other pressing issues, Remote Work Revolution is essential for navigating the enduring challenges teams and managers face. Filled with specific actionable steps and interactive tools, this timely book will help team members deliver results previously out of reach. Following Neeley’s advice, employees will be able to break through routine norms to successfully use remote work to benefit themselves, their groups, and ultimately their organizations.

The overwhelming majority of a software system’s lifespan is spent in use, not in design or implementation. So, why does conventional wisdom insist that software engineers focus primarily on the design and development of large-scale computing systems? In this collection of essays and articles, key members of Google’s Site Reliability Team explain how and why their commitment to the entire lifecycle has enabled the company to successfully build, deploy, monitor, and maintain some of the largest software systems in the world. You’ll learn the principles and practices that enable Google engineers to make systems more scalable, reliable, and efficient—lessons directly applicable to your organization. This book is divided into four sections: Introduction—Learn what site reliability engineering is and why it differs from conventional IT industry practices Principles—Examine the patterns, behaviors, and areas of concern that influence the work of a site reliability engineer (SRE) Practices—Understand the theory and practice of an SRE’s day-to-day work: building and operating large distributed computing systems Management—Explore Google's best practices for training, communication, and meetings that your organization can use

The ultimate handbook for fostering and cultivating a strong team culture, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Culture Code and The Talent Code. “If you are a leader—or if you work with one—and want to understand how to build psychological safety, trust, and a sense of purpose for your team, then you need this book.”—Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit Building a team has never been harder than it is right now. How do you create connection and trust? How do you stay focused on your goals? In his years studying the ways successful groups work together, Daniel Coyle has spent time with elite teams around the world, observing the ways they support each other, manage conflict, and move toward a common goal. In The Culture Playbook, he distills everything he has learned into sixty concrete, actionable tips and exercises that will help your team build a cohesive, positive culture. Great cultures, Coyle has found, are built on three essential skills: safety, vulnerability, and purpose. Within this framework, he shows us how we can better serve our teammates, ourselves, and our shared purpose, including: • scheduling regular team “tune-ups” to place an explicit spotlight on the team’s inner workings and create conversations that surface and improve team dynamics • creating spaces for remote coworkers to connect with their colleagues to foster a team spirit even across distances • holding an anxiety party to serve as a pressure-relief valve, as well as a platform for people to connect and solve problems together With reflections, exercises, and practical tips that will prove invaluable to companies, athletes, and families alike, and replete with black-and-white illustrations, The Culture Playbook is an indispensable guide to ensuring that your team performs at its best.

Reimagining Agile for Distributed and Remote Teams Distributed work is now inevitable, but conventional agile approaches are too "synchronous" for today's remote teams. Meetings, ceremonies, and rituals can become unsustainable when teams are scattered across the globe. The result: burnout, constant interruptions, a lack of deep work, poor work-life balance, greater frustration, and workplaces with poor diversity. In The Async-First Playbook, Thoughtworks Principal Product Manager Sumeet Gayathri Moghe provides tools and techniques to embed remote-native, asynchronous practices into traditional agile methods, making remote work more efficient, inclusive, thoughtful, and fun. Drawing on extensive experience leading distributed teams, Moghe addresses the "nuts and bolts" of specific practices and the crucial "softer" elements such as culture, mindset, and leadership. Short, practical chapters show how to adapt traditional agile techniques such as sprints and pair programming for the realities of today's distributed environments. Whatever your project, you'll learn how to create asynchronous environments that promote success, improve the workplace experience, and deliver better results. Discover why asynchronous collaboration is crucial to your project's success Learn the tools, skills, and protocols you need to get right in order to go "async-first" Map current agile techniques to async-first versions that better reflect today's realities Become a more supportive and effective leader of async-first teams Anticipate, navigate, and mitigate the pitfalls of async-first distributed work Bring it all together--walk through your async-first transition Access valuable resources, examples, and hands-on templates at the companion website "This playbook will empower you to lead and build differently. All that you need is an open mind and a belief that the status quo isn't worthy of defining the future." --From the Foreword by Darren Murph Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.