Enabling Remote Work and Distributed Teams

Part 1: Introduction – White Collar Labor Statistics and Current Trends

1. Setting a context for remote & virtual enablement
2. What do teams need?
3. Responsibilities of the employer
4. Responsibilities of the employee

Part 2: Categories of Remote Work

1. Team collaboration
2. Project management & project work
3. Coaching
4. Training & learning
5. Everything else

Group Exercise: Take an inventory of how you’re already working remotely

Part 3: What’s Already Working: 10 Best Practices

1. Daily ceremonies
2. Classes of communication urgency
3. Feedback mechanisms
4. Mobbing & swarming
5. Working agreements
6. Continuously integrating
7. A guide to wikis
8. File sharing & naming conventions
9. Remote etiquette
10. Introduction to tools

Part 4: Overcoming Common Challenges

1. Engagement
2. Accountability
3. Time & priority management
4. Productivity
5. Policy constraints and technical challenges

Group Discussion: Where’s the water cooler?

Part 5: Managing Expectations

1. Using prework for groups
2. Prerequisites and test requirements
3. How to approach accountability
4. Establishing goals
5. Metrics for effectiveness
6. Results vs. activities

Demo: A rubric for expectations

Part 6: Security: More Important Than Ever

1. Common risks associated with remote work
2. Understanding technical vulnerability
3. Key behaviors for secure remote teams
4. The importance of straightforward policy
5. Balancing security with flexibility

Part 7: A Primer on Distributed Collaboration Tools

1. Tools for projects
2. Tools for teams
3. Tools for meetings
4. Tools for organizational alignment

Group exercise: Story mapping with Mural

Part 8: A Primer on Distributed Engineering Tools

1. What’s possible in the cloud
2. Tools overview: distributed IT services
3. Tools overview: version control
4. Tools overview: configuration & automation
5. Tools overview: containers & architecture
6. Tools overview: patterns and antipatterns

Part 9: Conclusion: Next Steps and Q&A

Guided by your expert facilitator, we’ll spend some time committing to specific next steps you can use as soon as you leave the workshop to be more effective as a remote workforce.

• Managers and team members
• Project and product teams
• Sales and marketing teams
• HR staff
• Anyone responsible for tools, licenses, or policy
• Small and medium businesses just getting started with remote work
• Anyone new to working from home or remotely

• Rapidly adopt best practices for working as a distributed team
• Select and adopt tools for supporting distributed work
• Understand the different types of remote work and how to navigate them
• Maintain productivity, engagement, and accountability while working remotely
• Overcome common objections, roadblocks and distractions
• Successfully stay connected with teams and colleagues
• Navigate cloud-enabled technologies to support projects and technical work
• Measure and track the productivity of your own distributed teams