These are my notes on Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais’s Remote Team Interactions Workbook: Using Team Topologies Patterns for Remote Working .

A Team Topologies companion with homework to map your current team topologies, and useful advise for remote work.

Thanks to ITRevolution for the complimentary copy!

Key Insights

• Physical office was covering up poorly defined teams and poorly defined ares of focus.
• In a remote work setting, it is vital to “over communicate”.
• In remote settings, keep it shorter and sharper: it’s harder to hold people’s attention remotely.
• Facilitating interaction longer than a few weeks suggests something isn’t quite right.
• In the context of remote work, it is too easy to accidentally fall into a swamp of direct private messages.

Homework

• Define your Team API.
• Track team dependencies.
• Start a network-building event: communities of practice, internal tech events, lunchtime talks, coffee breaks.
• Trust boundaries assessment.
• Online space assessment.
• Cognitive load assessment/Internal platform survey.

Preface

• Physical office was covering up poorly defined teams and poorly defined ares of focus.
• A successful remote-first approach requires the explicit design of communication between teams using physical and online spaces.

Chapter 1 - Overview - Focus on Remote Team Interactions

• Google’s five keys to successful teams:
  1. Psychological safety.
  2. Dependability.
  3. Structure and clarity.
  4. Meaning.
  5. Impact.
• Cognitive load assessment:
  • This is something the platform team should use as a KPI.
• Problematic dependency between teams, symptoms:
  • Delays.
  • Increase WIP.
  • Unpredictability.
• Instead of waiting, focus on tracking and then removing the in-flow dependencies.
  • Making Work Visible by Dominca De Grandis.
• In a remote work setting, it is vital to “over communicate”:
  • What, why, how, when will be done.

Chapter 2: Team Dependencies

• Techniques to track and manage inter-team dependencies, to promote healthy ones, and minimize others.
• Team API:
  • For remote teams, especially important:
    • Road map: how to notify changes?
    • Communication preferences:
      • Channel, schedule.
      • Expected response time.
  • Template
• Dependencies can never be fully eradicated.
• Not all dependencies are the same:
  • Blocking vs non-blocking.
  • Healthy vs unhealthy.
  • Frequent vs infrequent.
• Tracking dependencies:
  • Add dependency tag to stories.
  • Physical dependency matrix.
  • Dependency swimlane board:
    • Add a specific lane to your Kanban board with the tasks that depend on other teams.
  • Simple table.
• Internal network:
  • Virtual coffee.
  • Internal conference.
  • Communities of Practice.
  • Brown bag sessions.
  • Enabling teams.
• Keep it shorter and sharper: it’s harder to hold people’s attention remotely.

Chapter 3: Setting Team Boundaries

• Group trust boundaries:
  • Dunbar numbers.
  • Groups slightly smaller than the trust boundary are likely to have good trust. Larger than are likely to have trust issues and are candidate to splitting into smaller groups.
  • When the size of an online space reaches a trust boundary, create a new space.
  • Online space aligned to flow of change.
  • Optimize for trust within online spaces.
• Chat tools:
  • Standardise channel names:
    • TeamType_TeamName.
    • Team_InteractionMode_Team.
  • People name to include team they belong to.
  • Explicit etiquette.

Chapter 4: Purposeful Interactions

• Facilitating interaction longer than a few weeks suggests something isn’t quite right.
• Difficulties or awkwardness in team interactions can be used as a kind of sensing mechanism to help evolve the org.
• Focus on flow.
• In the context of remote work, it is too easy to accidentally fall into a swamp of direct private messages.
• Define usage guidelines for Slack/Teams/…
• Curate the chat workspace.

Chapter 5: Next steps

• Internal Platform survey.
• Internal personas.
• Naming and usage for chat tools: don’t attempt to design everything upfront, allow some patterns to emerge.
• Expect rework.