Use the flexibility of remote work to work out your “pairing” hours. Get into the practice of writing good commit messages and pass on the baton.

With a checklist in place, create a simple recorded demo showing each of the test conditions and "default to action" until the PO and tester are available.

Queue up candidate stories for the next sprint, about a week in advance. Let the devs take a look at them and ask questions.

Between the PO, tech lead and tester, you have representation for the three amigos of agile software development.

DoR allows the team to set a standard for user stories that developers pick up. The DoD ensures developers aren’t aiming for a moving target.

Most project management tools allow you to define a workflow for your team and visualise that workflow as a task board. When you revisit your workflow be careful not to design for the exceptions and worst-case scenarios.

Most project management tools allow you to define a workflow for your team and visualise that workflow as a task board. Your task board should be the source of truth for all the work your team is up to.

It’s much easier to apologise than to get permission. In this world of computers, the best thing to do is to do it.

Broadcast how your team will interact with other teams, using a TEAM API.

This play has examples of how you can bring the phrase “async-first” into everyday conversation, by making it a catchphrase.

Distributed projects are chaotic to run without artefacts. The DEEP acronym provides you a mnemonic to remember what to document.

Complex topics need time to understand and to engage with. WUCA outlines a team approach to deal with complex discussions.

To minimise each team’s cognitive load and to limit noisy interactions, you may need to revisit your team structures. Team topologies offer you a handy framework to rethink what teams you need and how they interact.

You won’t know if your changes make a difference, until you have indicators and metrics in place. Use the leading and lagging indicators in this method, as your sensible default.

Identify your team values using a short, one hour workshop. By the end of this exercise, you’ll have a list of values and rough notes about what they mean to you.

While there is value in getting people together, we need to acknowledge that collaboration and creativity have little correlation with synchrony.

Agreeing on response times for various collaboration tools and channels that you use on the team is important.

Instead of trying to get everyone to agree on every decision, adopt a consent based decision making process as your default.

Writing up your team’s ways of working wrt collaboration, the environments, tools and project metrics is a good start.

Project handbooks are a fast and effective way to align the team, share knowledge and onboard people.