Preface

Why We Wrote This Workbook

T he COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 and beyond has ushered in a new remote-first world for IT along with most other departments in the business. But many organizations have struggled to catch up with new tooling and ways of working. While some companies have embraced this new reality—ditching their expensive downtown offices and telling staff they can work from home permanently—many more organizations 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.

A successful remote-first approach requires the explicit design of communication between teams using physical and online spaces. 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.

In this workbook, we explore 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

•why and how organizations can use the three team interaction modes from Team Topologies (collaboration, X-as-a-Service, and facilitating) to help.

We hope these ideas and patterns will help you and your organization become more effective with a team-based, remote-first approach to building and running software systems.

Also, we’d like to thank Rich Allen for his invaluable contributions to this workbook.

—Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais

August 2021