Course Description
This fast-paced, hands-on workshop teaches you and your teams how to thrive in a world where everyone is working from home. Our experts have led and coached many virtual teams in their own work, and in this workshop, they share their expertise with you.
The shift to remote work may feel sudden, but for many it’s nothing new. Enterprise technology and project teams in particular have been overcoming the challenges of being distributed for quite some time. This is good news, as there’s a robust body of knowledge and many good practices available to draw from. There’s also a wide range of tools available to support them. In fact, many recent trends in both practices and tools are specifically designed with remote and distributed teams in mind. We’ll show you how to use them, and quickly equip you for productivity in the world of remote work.
At the end of this 4-hour virtual workshop, you’ll understand how to:
- 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
Agenda
Part 1: Introduction – white collar labor statistics and current trends
- Setting a context for remote & virtual enablement
- What do teams need?
- Responsibilities of the employer
- Responsibilities of the employee
Part 2: Categories of remote work
- Team collaboration
- Project management & project work
- Coaching
- Training & learning
- Everything else
Group Exercise: Take an inventory of how you’re already working remotely
Part 3: What’s already working: 10 best practices
- Daily ceremonies
- Classes of communication urgency
- Feedback mechanisms
- Mobbing & swarming
- Working agreements
- Continuously integrating
- A guide to wikis
- File sharing & naming conventions
- Remote etiquette
- Introduction to tools
Part 4: Overcoming common challenges
- Engagement
- Accountability
- Time & priority management
- Productivity
- Policy constraints and technical challenges
Group Discussion: Where’s the water cooler?
Part 5: Managing expectations
- Using prework for groups
- Prerequisites and test requirements
- How to approach accountability
- Establishing goals
- Metrics for effectiveness
- Results vs. activities
Demo: A rubric for expectations
Part 6: Security: more important than ever
- Common risks associated with remote work
- Understanding technical vulnerability
- Key behaviors for secure remote teams
- The importance of straightforward policy
- Balancing security with flexibility
Part 7: A primer on distributed collaboration tools
- Tools for projects
- Tools for teams
- Tools for meetings
- Tools for organizational alignment
Group exercise: Story mapping with Mural
Part 8: A primer on distributed engineering tools
- What’s possible in the cloud
- Tools overview: distributed IT services
- Tools overview: version control
- Tools overview: configuration & automation
- Tools overview: containers & architecture
- 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.
Substitution & Cancellation Policy:You may cancel or reschedule up to 21 days prior to the start date of the class at no penalty. For any cancellation or reschedule requests within 21 days, the full course tuition is still due and not eligible for refund. Any paid tuition will be credited towards a future class and must be used within 12 months.*Partner delivered courses may be subject to different cancellation terms