Remote-first work is the "new normal" for companies around the world. There is no shortage of advice on how individual teams can bond and work effectively remotely.

However, there is not much on how to address remote interactions between different teams that need to collaborate remotely, as part of the same value stream. Moving from the physical to the online world can further expose pre-existing interaction problems, increase wait times and slow down delivery and possibly response to incidents.

Based on the ideas from Team Topologies, here are some useful approaches to clarify and evolve inter-team interactions and communication in this remote-first world.

Remote Team Interactions Workbook

Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, coauthors of the highly popular 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.

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.

Articles and reading

• Public talks on Team Topologies by the authors

• Why you should hire DevOps enablers, not experts [TechBeacon]

• Forget monoliths vs. microservices. Cognitive load is what matters [TechBeacon]

Templates

These templates can help you to define and discuss concepts with people in your organization. All templates are CC BY-SA (Creative Commons).

• GitHub.com/TeamTopologies

  • Team-API-template

  • Team-Dependencies-Tracking

  • Thin-Platform-template

  • Team-Cognitive-Load-Assessment

  • Independent-Service-Heuristics

Video

Slides