Remote Team Interactions Workbook: Using Team Topologies Patterns for Remote Working

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.

Matthew Skelton has been building, deploying, and operating commercial software systems since 1998. Head of Consulting at Conflux, he specializes in Continuous Delivery, operability and organization design for software in manufacturing, ecommerce, and online services, including cloud, IoT, and embedded software. He currently lives in the UK.

Manuel Pais is a DevOps and Delivery Coach and Consultant, focused on teams and flow first. He helps organizations adopt test automation and continuous delivery, as well as understand DevOps from both technical and human perspectives. Manuel has been in the industry since 2000, having worked in Belgium, Portugal, Spain, and the UK. He currently lives in Madrid, Spain.